Blood on the Bayou (5 page)

Even if he were capable of keeping his mouth shut, I wouldn’t risk it. I don’t want to put him in danger, or endure the inevitable lecture about offering aid to the enemy. No matter what I decide, as far as Fern’s concerned, Hitch will always be the enemy. It took him a while to put two and two together, but he’s realized that Hitch is the reason I ended up back in Donalsonville a crankier, sadder, more jaded person than I was before. He’ll never forgive Hitch for that. Fernando is like a big brother that way. He picks on me relentlessly, but he’d die before he let anyone else hurt me.

Aaaannd
now I feel awful for thinking shitty things about him.

I slip an arm around his waist. “But thanks for the warning. It would usually be muchly appreciated.”

“Fairy Containment and Control crap, huh?” He
gives me a one-armed hug. “Aren’t you supposed to be suspended until next week?”

“Yeah. He’s just following up on the Breeze house stuff,” I bluff, resisting the temptation to elaborate. Vague is best. I’ll be less likely to contradict myself later.

“I think you should tell him to screw off and come back next week.”

“I could. But then I’d have to see him again.”

“Right.” He shudders. “Better to get it over with. Like a shot.”

I stiffen and pull away. I don’t want to think about shots or magic or how many things I’m keeping from my best friend. “I should get to it. We still on for supper?”

“Absolutely, but let’s do it at your house. I can bring everything over and cook on your sorry excuse for a stove.”

“But I thought you were going to ask some of the boys to eat with us.” I was looking forward to a tableful of whatever flamboyant guests happened to be staying at The First and Last Chance Flophouse. Nothing to keep your mind off your troubles like heated debates on fashion, politics, musical theater, and the latest gay porn.

“I was, but considering Hitch is one of my ‘boys’ for the next four days and three nights, I didn’t think—”

“He’s staying at your place?”

“Tell me about it.” He runs a dramatic hand through his hair. “I can’t remember the last time someone that straight slept under my roof. It’s bringing
the fabulous levels in the house
waaaay
down. He left at five o’clock this morning to go jogging. Then he came back to shower and didn’t even bother putting any product in that springy clown hair of his. Just walked out frizzy as hell in saggy jeans and a grungy T-shirt. It was like the nineties came back to haunt me, and they were even uglier than I remembered.”

“I like the curls.” I also like those jeans and grungy T-shirts. They remind me of when Hitch and I would roam the French Quarter on Sunday mornings, hunting down coffee and beignets before going back to his place and gorging on pastry and each other.

Fern raises an eyebrow. “Uh-un. No, you don’t. No smiling, or fond remembering or whatever you’re doing right now. You don’t like anything about him. You don’t notice the way he looks like sex on a stick. He’s bad for you.”

“I know.”

“And practically married.”

“I know.”

“
And
going to be a
daddy
before Valentine’s Day.”

“I know!” I hold my hands in the air and try to look innocent. “I have to go, okay? I’m going to be late.”

“You’re already late.”

Hitch’s drawl. From right behind me.

Balls
.

F
ifteen minutes late,” he adds.

I spin with a smile, praying Hitch didn’t hear that he was the subject of discussion. The only thing worse than Fernando thinking I still have a thing for Hitch is
Hitch
thinking I still have a thing for Hitch. I shrug. “That’s practically on time.”

“If you’re you.” He steps into the alley, breathtaking in jeans so broken in I can feel how soft they are just looking at them and a threadbare blue T-shirt that shows the skin beneath in the really thin patches. His sun-streaked brown hair fuzzes in curls around his head and his face is shadowed with patchy whiskers. Like an adorable dog with a mild case of the mange.

Yum
. I have no idea what Fern’s talking about. The nineties were a good decade. At least they look good on Hitch.

“But I’m not you,” he says, in his new, more-adult-than-thou-wilt-ever-be voice, the one that makes me remember why I was working up a healthy resentment of him a month back.

“Sorry for the wait,” I say. “I forgot about the construction
and then Fern had some important things to tell me about food. I figured our FCC conversation could wait a few minutes while we decided on fish or steak for dinner.”

Hitch’s expression loses its irritated edge. I silently congratulate myself on passing the lateness buck onto Fern and the need to pretend Hitch and I aren’t up to anything of interest. “Of course.” He lifts a hand in Fern’s direction and smiles. “I’d go with steak. Nothing like a hunk of meat on the grill at the end of a long day.”

“And Annabelle
does
like her a hunk of meat.”

I shoot Fern a dirty look, but he’s already backing away. “See you at seven,” he says. “Buy something red for supper. Cabernet or Syrah. No Merlot.”

“Merlot can be good.”

“So can cat shit,” he says. “If it’s buried in the dirt where I don’t have to smell it.” He waves and turns to walk away, a swagger in his step that wasn’t there before.

Fernando can’t resist putting on a show, even when he knows the audience isn’t interested. Hitch is as straight as a stick, and—if Fern’s stories are to be believed—not only in his sexual tastes. The old Hitch considered skinny dipping in the lake behind his house the only respectable form of exercise. Well, that, and other clothing-optional activities that work up a sweat . . .

Activities that I
refuse
think about.

I clear my throat. “Heard you were up at five to go jogging. Intense.”

The smile he put on for Fern slips. “I couldn’t sleep, and I had some other business to take care of. Thought I might as well do something productive. This whole thing is just . . .”

His eyes scrunch with worry and for the first time I notice the tiny wrinkles around his baby blues. He looks older, tired . . . scared. The only time I’ve seen Hitch scared was when he was seconds away from being torn apart by a swarm of fairies. He’s not immune. Even one bite would have killed him. Maybe instantly, the way fairy bites killed most of his highly allergic family during the initial emergence.

And now he’s scared again. It brings home the danger we’re facing in a meaningful way, but I’m still not as frightened as I should be. But then I don’t have a great job, a beautiful fiancée, or a baby on the way. I have less to lose, and magic on my side.

On
our
side.

That’s part of the reason I agreed to help Hitch. I know I have something to offer aside from the dumb luck of being immune to fairy bite. Too bad I can’t tell
him
anything about that. Tucker made it clear the FBI is at the top of the list of people who do
not
need to know about the Invisibles or the things I’m learning to do with my newfound magic. Not that Hitch would believe me, anyway. The old Hitch, who came from bayou people and grew up on folktales about fairy lights at midsummer and enchanted alligator men, might have at least considered it, but this new Hitch is all facts and logic.

“This isn’t going to be easy, or safe,” he warns.
“But it matters to me. A lot. I have to find out who did this as quickly as I can.”

“I’m sorry,” I say, meaning it. “I should have met you earlier.”

He shakes his head. “I really did have some other business to take care of. It’s good you pushed us back until nine. And you don’t have to be here at all, you know. You can still walk away. I won’t hold it against you.”

“No. I’m here.” Even slackers have codes, and being there for the people I care about is part of mine. “I’ll help however I can. As long as you need me.”

Relief makes Hitch’s shoulders sag. He steps forward and for a second I think he’s going to take my hand, but he doesn’t. Instead, his fingers curl into fists that he stuffs in his pockets. “Thank you,” he says, studying the gum-pocked asphalt. “I’m . . . glad.”

Me, too. Glad he didn’t touch me. Simply standing this close to him is enough to make my chest ache.

“No worries,” I say, voice as light as I can make it. “What’s the plan?”

He searches the alley behind me and then casts a glance over his shoulder in true paranoid spy fashion. “I have two supervisors I can trust. If we get the name of the FBI operative involved in this or even a firm location on the cave, I’ll feel comfortable turning the investigation over. But I can’t risk it right now. Even if they believed me, we’d waste time with preliminaries and give whoever killed Steven a chance to cover his tracks.”

I nod. “If someone in the organization killed him,
you can’t let them know you’re looking into the murder until you have real evidence.”

“Right.” The tension around his eyes eases. “So I thought you could take a trip out to the docks this morning. In the information Steven sent me, he included the shipping manifests from the Gramercy port, just south of here. They’ve had a lot of discrepancies in the past few years. At first it was the usual stuff—a few leather coats gone missing, a box of designer purses that fell off the barge, that sort of—”

“I remember that. One of the Junkyard Kings was selling Coach crap last Christmas.”

He lifts a brow. “The Junkyard Kings?”

“The men singing down the street from my house last night,” I say, remembering the way the Kings’ song drifted through the muggy air, weaving Hitch and me closer together. “They live in the junkyard.”

“And have delusions of grandeur.”

“Don’t we all?”

He rewards me with a tight smile. “I don’t know. Do we?” His eyes meet mine and I see a hint of the old Hitch,
my
Hitch, the one who didn’t have everything in the world figured out and secured with a regulation knot.

“I don’t know.” I shrug and look away, wishing every other moment with this man wasn’t an exercise in extreme discomfort. “But the purses and crap . . . Isn’t that part of doing business in the infested states? Don’t most companies expect to lose stuff?”

“Sure. Some skimming is expected,” he says, nudging a smashed paper cup under the Dumpster
with his shoe. “But a few months ago, major shipments of medical supplies started disappearing from the Gramercy port. Over a hundred thousand dollars of product was lost in July and they’re expecting higher numbers for August. The dock crew said the goods were gone when the boats arrived, but the captains swear they weren’t boarded between Memphis and Gramercy. The supplies had to have been stolen while the dock workers were unloading the cargo for storage until the boats arrived from New Orleans and Galveston.”

“Those are FCC operatives working out there.” I can’t help being shocked. The dock workers make at least thirty grand a year more than I do, and I make enough to have everything I need and a hundred thousand or so left over to donate to Sweet Haven. Pinching a few designer purses I can understand, but hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of medical supplies? “Those guys are getting paid very,
very
well.”

“Maybe not well enough.”

“Greedy bastards.” I may slack and run late and be on suspension from sample collecting, but at least I don’t steal from the people I’m supposed to be serving.

Though, really, what would I steal? Vials of swamp water? Fairy corpses? Poop?

“They’re more than greedy, they’re unexpectedly particular,” Hitch says. “They left the morphine and the Percocet and all the other easy-to-sell script drugs. Instead, they took a few thousand glass hypodermic needles and three cases of fairimilus.”

“I don’t even know what that is.”

“It’s a rare cyclic peptide derived from a fungus. It’s used as a serum in some malaria vaccines.” He sounds doctory, but not in the condescending way. This morning, doctor sounds good on Hitch. “It keeps the vaccine fresh longer than synthetic peptides. It’s also being used in the fairy venom vaccine research trials.”

“Ohhh . . . kay,” I say, connecting the dots. “So they’ve taken a super-rare serum and needles that can hold fairy venom without being corrupted the way metal would.” The notion gives me an unpleasant scratchy feeling in my brain, but I ignore it.

The Big Man and Tucker deal in drugs and needles, but they’re intensely antigovernment and have a small-time sneaky-criminal vibe. My gut tells me the Invisibles aren’t connected to whatever’s happening at the cave. If they were, Hitch’s friend would have taken pictures of captives fighting someone they couldn’t see as they were dragged away.

“You said some of the people involved used to work in chemical weapons development?” I ask.

“Right.”

“So you’re thinking they’re working on a biological weapon. Using fairy venom.”

He nods. “If they were working on a vaccine, there’d be no reason to keep it secret.”

“And you’re thinking someone in the FBI is helping coordinate the operation and keep it off the government’s radar so these people don’t get caught.”