Wild Man's Curse (Wilds of the Bayou #1) (2 page)

“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 that 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 sure 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.

Where the hell was Harvey, the manager? Surely even the lounge at the Opry Shed Motel, a fleabag operation on the outskirts of downtown Nashville, had a few standards. Although the fact that Harvey had insisted she wear a short skirt (“The customers like seeing some leg”) and play only well-known songs (“The customers don’t like that hippie Cajun crap”) should’ve erased any expectations of quality. The fact he considered “hippie Cajun crap” a musical genre should’ve told her a lot.

Seeing no sign of Harvey, Ceelie broke into a favorite moldy oldie, one of the classics she didn’t mind singing. “Walkin’ After Midnight” fit her contralto voice and her mood most days. She’d done her share of late-night walking, lonesome and searching for something. She’d thought it was stardom; now, she’d settle for a little respect.

She’d left Houma, Louisiana, ten years ago with a half-empty suitcase, a guitar, a head filled with dreams and unwritten songs, and a promise to her late father. She’d sworn on his deathbed that she’d follow his greatest wish: as soon as he died she’d shake off the mud of Terrebonne Parish and never, ever look back.

She hadn’t expected to meet others just like her on every Nashville street corner, all competing to see whose dreams would get crushed first. To see how long it would take for each of them to crawl back to his or her respective backwoods town, grateful for a job at Walmart or the Piggly Wiggly. To see which ones would stick it out here and keep beating their heads against closed doors.

She’d beat her head against so many doors she should have brain damage. Maybe she did. It would explain a lot.

By the time Ceelie reached the last chord of “Midnight,” the drunk guy had managed to roll onto the stage and attract more enthusiasm from the audience than her music had. In fact, every eye was on him except those of her friend Sonia, who’d gotten her this gig out of pity. A part-time bartender, Sonia met Ceelie’s gaze and shrugged as if to say,
What do you expect from a dump like this?

Well, by God, if nobody was listening anyway, she’d try out her new song and screw the old country favorites. It was the first thing that had come to her after a creative drought that had lasted six months, maybe longer. Deep inside, she’d feared something so awful she hadn’t wanted to verbalize it: that her ability to write had left her.

A few soft strums in an A-minor chord led her into the tune that had awakened her in the middle of the night last week, propelled her from a deep sleep to work on it until time for her to make the morning waitressing shift at Music City Pancakes. She couldn’t get it out of her head and didn’t want to—it marked the return of her muse. At least, she hoped so. It wasn’t finished, but she could try out a part of it.

Its dying call is weak but clear

Yet it’s a plaintive voice I don’t want to hear.

I won’t go back,

I won’t go home,

’Cause next time, Whiskey Bayou won’t let me go.

Ceelie’s voice, rich and strong and smoky, was the thing she’d always thought would set her apart. It cut through the bar noise, and first one woman, then a trickle of faces, turned away from the drunk guy sitting on the edge of the stage and riveted onto her. She sang to them, poured her heart into words she believed about a place she’d abandoned at the first opportunity and yet couldn’t seem to forget.

The adrenaline shot through her as more people turned to listen. This was it. This was what she’d dreamed about. Not that the Opry Shed Motel lounge was the kind of place where talent agents or record producers hung out, but it was a start. People were actually listening.

Someone at a front table broke into a smile, and soon everyone began laughing.

“Whiskey Bayou” was not a happy song. What was she doing wrong?

From the corner of her eye, Ceelie registered movement a split second before the drunk guy reached her. He’d done a turtle crawl across the stage while she’d been wrapped up in her daydreams and now stood on his knees, holding out his arms to her.

Enough.
Before she could talk herself out of it, Ceelie planted a solid boot to his shoulder and shoved.

The world flipped as the man fell backward, pulling her with him by one beefy hand wrapped around her knee. She screamed but no one could hear; the place had erupted into a thunder of laughter and applause.

Her guitar. Where had it gone? That vintage Gibson was the one thing of value she owned, and Ceelie scrambled to her feet in search of it, pushing the drooling letch away from her and expelling a breath of relief when she spotted it, intact, a few feet away on the stage.

She and the Gibson were getting the heck out of here.

The crowd continued to applaud as her unwanted co-entertainer climbed to his feet and took drunken bows at center stage.
Good for him.
His antics allowed her to exit without anyone taking notice.

Or so she thought. She spotted the missing manager before she’d cleared the backstage stairs and made it into the hallway to the dressing room, which was a fancy name for a converted closet. The only things crammed in it were a small table, a peeling mirror, and a gunmetal-gray folding chair.

“Honey, that was genius!” Harvey threw an arm around her shoulders and gave her a hug. He might have reached five-five in his shiny black platform shoes, which gave him a couple of inches’ height advantage over Ceelie. Plus he smelled as if he’d fallen into a vat of cheap aftershave. “If you’d told me you were willing to do comedy, I coulda pulled in a bigger crowd. Who’s your partner?”

Ceelie wrested herself from his grasp and gawked.
What an idiot.
“Seriously? You think that was planned? I should sue you for letting that letch onstage.”

The glee drained from Harvey’s expression, replaced by dead brown eyes and a downturn of thin lips topped by a wisp of hair he probably considered a moustache. “You mean that crap you were singing was supposed to be music?”

Ceelie thinned her own lips in response.

“Let’s put it this way, sweetheart. If you and your buddy out there want to make this a regular act, I’ll sign you on for a two-week run. You want to go onstage and sing that depressing shit, you’re fired.”

Ceelie considered the offer for a few seconds, then chided herself for being so desperate. She’d take an extra shift serving waffles to tourists in shiny snakeskin cowboy boots before stooping that low. After all, she’d practically been raised by the most independent woman in Terrebonne Parish, Louisiana, who always told her she was strong enough to follow her own mind and deal with the consequences.

“Pay me for tonight and you’ll never see me again.”

Harvey pointed toward the dressing-room closet. “Get your stuff and take a hike. You didn’t finish a set. No set, no pay. I ain’t running no charity here.”

“Fine.” She clutched the Gibson closer and stalked toward the dressing room. “And by the way, screw you and the pig you rode in on.” Pity the pig.

“You wish, sweetheart.”

It took Ceelie mere seconds to snatch up her makeup bag, purse, and jacket. When she stomped back out, intending to stop by the bar and let Sonia know what happened, Harvey stood blocking the hallway.

“I been thinking. You ain’t half–bad looking with that dark skin and funny eyes—like a blue-eyed Injun. You want to get paid for tonight, I know another way you could make up for not finishing your set.”

Ceelie ground her teeth but held her tongue long enough to give Harvey a slow, sexy-eyed once-over, from the grease in his dyed-black hair to the silver neck bling visible beneath the half-buttoned shirt; from the tight pants that promised way too little all the way to the pointy tips of his shiny platform shoes.

She looked him in the eye. “Eh, no thanks. I’d die first.”

Turning on her heel, she headed for the back door at a fast clip, unsure if she’d slapped at a gnat or poked a grizzly and not wanting to find out which one old Harvey would turn out to be. He called her a few choice names but didn’t follow.

Definitely a gnat.

The night air in Nashville had fallen into the low seventies with a promise of autumn, so Ceelie decided to forego the cab she’d have taken had it been either hotter or later. The neighborhood between here and her domino-sized studio apartment was well lit, and people tended to be mobile on Friday nights in Nashville. Plus, she needed fresh air and time to think.

She’d hit rock bottom. That’s all there was to it. She didn’t make enough money off tips at the pancake house to pay the rent and utilities, but that early waitressing shift left her afternoons and evenings free to write songs, knock on doors, and pick up a stray performing gig. Not that she had anything new in the songwriting department except a half-finished tune that was, as Harvey had pointed out, depressing shit. Cajun hippie depressing shit at that.

She’d been fooling herself; tonight had rubbed in that message loud and clear. Nashville thrived off the hard work and substandard wages of idiots like Ceelie Savoie, willing to do anything for the privilege of sustaining their dreams.

Her phone vibrated in the bag she’d slung over her shoulder, but she ignored it. Ceelie wasn’t ready to talk to Sonia, who’d probably figured out by now that she was gone. The smartphone had been the one luxury she’d allowed herself, based on the conviction that any day now, the dream agent could call, or the guy who’d been in the back of fill-in-the-blank lounge had been touched by her music and wanted to talk contracts.

The acknowledgment that those dreams had begun to die brought with it other hard truths. She was bone tired, for one thing. Weary of the constant swim against the current, the struggle for money, the worry about when she’d catch a break, or if she’d break first. Her feet hurt, and not just because the soles of her boots had worn thin. Her heart hurt. When she’d left Louisiana with what little she had left from the sale of her dad’s house, she’d never dreamed that a decade later she might be worse off.

Feeling more like sixty-eight than twenty-eight, Ceelie huffed to the third-floor studio apartment with her usual prayer—that the locks hadn’t been changed while she was out. She’d already gotten the eviction notice. The key clicked home, however, and the deadbolt turned.

Inside, slid underneath the door, she found a note in the tall, looping handwriting of the building manager:

Sorry doll, but you gotta be out by Monday morning. You can store stuff with me if you need to. —J

Juanita was a good soul, even if her building was a firetrap and the absentee landlord made her do his dirty work. Like evicting deadbeat tenants.

Ceelie collapsed onto the only real piece of furniture in the place besides the futon she used as a bed, an overstuffed brown armchair she and Sonia had found at a yard sale for ten bucks and hauled up the steps themselves. Forty-eight hours and she’d officially be homeless.

Rock. Bottom.

Her options were limited. Sonia would put her up, but Ceelie’s friend had a studio apartment not much bigger than this one, plus her own set of dreams. She tended bar at the Opry Shed, did odd jobs around town to help pay her way through the local community college, and hoped to earn a transfer scholarship to study art at Vanderbilt.

They’d joked about their futures: Sonia would buy her own art gallery, and Ceelie would take time off her third world tour to play at its grand opening.

Sonia would make it, but Ceelie’s gut told her it was time for a do-over on her part. She could write songs, sing, and cook. Period. Since she’d proven incapable of supporting herself with the first two, maybe she could find a job in a restaurant kitchen and work her way up. Music would become a hobby, not a vocation. If she could accept that once and for all, the rest might work itself out.

Accepting that the thing she loved most was going to fail her, or that she had failed it? Gut-wrenching.

The phone vibrated again, and Ceelie dug it out of her bag with a sigh. Might as well break the news to Sonia that she would have an uninvited visitor, at least for a few days. She had nowhere else to live until she could find another job or go full time at the pancake house.

Ceelie frowned at the number on the screen, recognizing the 985 area code all too well. She’d used it her whole life, at least until she’d left Louisiana behind. Her mom had taken off when she was a kid, and her dad died from cancer at age forty-six after too many years working shifts at the gas plant. That was a fact of life and death in South Louisiana, which is why he’d practically ordered her to leave the first chance she got, before she got trapped there like he had been.

Bottom line: she had nobody in Houma anymore. Her “hello” was more than a little hesitant.

The caller, speaking in the heavy accent that sent an unexpected wave of homesickness across Ceelie’s chest, identified himself as a deputy with the Terrebonne Parish Sheriff’s Office. “We been tryin’ to reach Celestine Savoie, formerly of Houma.”

Ceelie had shaken off her full first name along with the bayou mud, and the sound of it pulled her into a time warp. “I don’t go by Celestine anymore, but I guess that’s me.”

“I got some news about one of your family members, Ms. Savoie, and I’m afraid it’s bad.”

Ceelie shifted the phone to her left hand and rubbed her temple with her right. “Sorry, but you must have the wrong person after all. I don’t have any family left in Houma.”