River Road (5 page)

My mouth fell open. Where the hell had Jean Lafitte gotten a Corvette? And what moron had taught him to drive? Thank God it was still early enough on a Saturday morning that he hadn’t run over anyone or crashed through a line of parked cars.

Jean killed the engine and climbed out, examining the remote-control lock with interest. His wavy dark hair was pulled back as it had been last night, but he’d traded his red silk shirt for a simple white tunic. He’d wedged a long-barreled pistol under his wide black belt, and I was sure a few well-placed knives had been tucked somewhere I couldn’t see.

He needed to be more discreet with his weaponry. The pistol might look like a movie prop but it had a kick. I knew, because he’d once tried to shoot me with it. I wasn’t sure what our relationship was, but it had at least advanced beyond attempted murder.

Jean and Alex greeted each other like old enemies under a temporary truce—with a raised eyebrow and slight nod.

Jean planted a chivalrous kiss on my cheek and gave me a frowning appraisal. “You look as lovely as ever this morning,
Jolie
. Although I hope for our dinner date you will wear a fetching gown rather than the clothing of a peasant farm worker.”

I closed my eyes. Old Loose Lips
would
have to mention the dinner date. Alex’s glare hit my back like a physical blow.

“Let’s get started,” I said, filled with sudden, brisk efficiency. “Where are we meeting the mers? I’ve written down the name of several boat-rental places in Venice since the road ends just south of there.” I turned to Jean. “Can you navigate us to Pass a Loutre? We don’t want to attract attention by hiring a guide.”

The last thing we needed was a nosy guy from the river authority snooping around, or a friendly angler seeing a much bigger fish than he’d ever dreamed of, possibly a female variety with bared breasts.

Jean pulled a folded sheet of paper from inside his shirt. “I wrote down the name of the establishment where my friend Rene and the blackguard Denis Villere have agreed to meet. Then Rene says he will take us to Pass a Loutre on his fishing vessel.”

I unfolded the sheet of Hotel Monteleone stationery and struggled to untangle the swooping loops and flourishes of Jean’s handwriting:
The Black Velvet. Buras. 11 a.m.

“What’s the Black Velvet?” I asked, suspicious. Sounded like a naughty nightclub.

“It is a dining establishment,” Jean said, watching with interest as Alex spread his parish map over the hood of my SUV. The pirate did seem to love maps. Maybe I’d buy him an atlas for his 250th birthday.

Alex stared at Jean a moment before finally jerking his head from side to side with audible pops. “What’s the best way to get to Pass a Loutre?” he asked, sliding the map toward the pirate. They leaned over the hood and began debating directions and strategies.

Aw, the boys were playing nice. Maybe it wouldn’t be such a bad day after all.

I stuck my backpack in the rear hatch of the Pathfinder and pondered the Corvette. I could not in good conscience let a member of the historical undead drive through metro New Orleans in a car he’d gotten … How
had
he gotten the car?

I slammed the hatch and joined them. “We can all ride in my truck but, Jean, where’d you get the Corvette?”

He looked blank for a few moments before my meaning sunk in. “Ah, the automobile.” He said the word
automobile
slowly, tasted it, rolled it around on his tongue like a sip of new wine. “Is it not beautiful? You must accompany me to our rendezvous, and
Monsieur Chien
may follow us.”

Alex didn’t speak, but the map rattled as
Mr. Dog
refolded it with exaggerated care.

I shook my head. “No, everyone will ride with me.”

The Corvette was gorgeous, except for the little crack in its fiberglass body and the missing paint where Jean had virtually mown over the stop sign to enter the parking lot. But I valued my life too much to ride in a sports car driven by a 230-year-old pirate even if it was a glossy cherry red with black leather seats.

“Non.”
Jean frowned. “This is not acceptable. I wish to deliver the automobile to my friend Rene today. You must ride with me. My apologies, of course,
Monsieur
.” He looked at Alex without a hint of apology.

Alex crossed his arms over his chest, a bad sign. “Do you have a driver’s license, Captain Lafitte?”

Jean smiled. “I do not, sir, but perhaps Drusilla will drive and give me automobile lessons, after which I might obtain such a document.” Right, and I wanted to be a fly on the wall of the Louisiana Office of Motor Vehicles when he went in for his driving test.

The blanket of dread I’d been ignoring all morning settled over my head like a shroud. We weren’t going to be in Buras in time to forestall a merman war if the shapeshifter and the undead pirate didn’t stop posturing. If I were the most mature person here, life had reached a new depth of pathetic.

I tossed my keys to Alex. “Follow us in the Pathfinder. I’ll drive the ’Vette. Jean, hand over the keys. You’re riding with me.”

It was the only solution. Jean couldn’t drive, he wouldn’t leave the car, and if the two of them rode all the way to Buras together, someone would end up bloody.

CHAPTER
5

We maneuvered slowly through the suburbs on the western side of the river, me driving the Corvette, Jean riding shotgun, Alex following behind. The ’Vette was a beauty, from its shiny exterior to its velvety leather seats to a set of dashboard controls that would give Captain Kirk an orgasm. Alex loved cars, and I thought it ironic that I drove the luxurymobile while he puttered ahead in my seven-year-old SUV.

“Is this still New Orleans?” Jean asked, frowning out the window.

I laughed. “Sort of. New Orleanians who don’t like New Orleans live on the Westbank and pretend they’re somewhere else.” Somewhere covered in concrete and strip malls, chain restaurants and the luxury of all-American convenience, just over the river and a world away from the historic city that birthed it—or the rat-infested, crime-riddled city that spawned it, depending on which side of the river one lived on.

We didn’t have to worry about traffic since it was Saturday, and before long we passed Belle Chasse, the last sizable outpost of Greater New Orleans suburbia.

“I’m almost afraid to bring it up again, but how
did
you get this car?” Jean was an opportunist. I figured he’d won it in a card game and planned to sell it to the merman, or Rene Delachaise had bought it and was paying Jean to deliver it. Although I had to question the judgment of anyone who’d entrust delivery of an expensive sports car to a guy who first died before the Pony Express had been conceived.

“There is an interesting story of how I procured this automobile,
Jolie
. In taking a morning stroll near my hotel, I took a short route to the square of Andrew Jackson and there I discovered it, behind a building. An individual had left it for the taking.”

Uh-oh. My blood pressure began a steady climb toward stroke level. “What building?”

“My apologies, but I do not remember precisely.” He smiled, closed his eyes, and leaned back as the wind whipped across his face. My own enjoyment of the convertible dived into free-fall.

I groaned. “Some idiot left his keys in the car and you stole it. Oh my God, you’re a freaking pirate. Of
course
you stole it.” My gullibility sometimes amazed even me. I’d try to think the best of a person and—
boom
—some reality obvious to everyone else knocked the bejesus out of me. I’d never hear the end of this from Alex.

“I am not a pirate, but a privateer, a simple businessman. How could you think me capable of thievery, Drusilla?” Jean sounded indignant. This from a guy with more than two hundred years’ experience in creative procurement. “
Voilà!
There it sat, just asking to be taken. Surely no person would leave a key in an automobile if he did not wish it to have a new owner,
oui
?”

Good Lord. What had I been thinking? What if we were stopped by the parish police? How could I explain driving downriver in a hot convertible with a big, armed Frenchman claiming to be the long-dead Jean Lafitte? I could be a little entrepreneurial in my problem-solving, but my willingness to act outside the rulebook didn’t quite extend to grand theft auto.

Thankfully, no law enforcement showed itself as we headed down Highway 23 in silence. Traffic dropped off, and the air stung my nose with the salty tang of the wetlands that grew ever closer on the right while the river levee loomed on the left. Nature wasn’t theoretical here; it was tied to the lifeblood of the place. We wound along a long stretch of blacktop that followed the path of the river. Occasionally, a ship passed and we had to look up to see it—another unsettling reminder of why this fragile land so far below sea level had gone completely underwater after Katrina.

I couldn’t appreciate the exotic beauty while worried about potential incarceration. I phoned Alex. “Stop somewhere and let us ride the rest of the way with you. We need to ditch this
stolen
Corvette.”

“Goddamn it.” Alex let loose a string of expletives that would make a pirate blush—most of them directed at Jean.

I handed him the phone. “Here, this is your mess. You talk to Alex.”

Jean examined the phone as if it were a new species of toad, and inched it toward his ear.
“Oui?”

A grin spread across his face, and he gave a low chuckle. “
Non, Monsieur Chien,
I do not wish to do that to myself. I prefer a lady’s company for such an activity.” He waited a few seconds in silence before handing the phone back to me with a shrug. “I believe he is no longer there.”

I believed Mr. Dog would not be speaking to either of us for a while.

We passed the town of Point a la Hache and arrived, if signs could be believed, at the community of Happy Jack, Louisiana. I pulled off the road at an abandoned gas station and drove behind what was left of the half-demolished building. Everything in Plaquemines Parish was either rotted, in the process of rotting, or new. Katrina had left no other options.

“I must deliver this automobile to Rene,” Jean protested when Alex pulled the Pathfinder next to us and stopped.

Not my problem. “You can tell him it’s behind the old Murphy Oil station in Happy Jack and he can come and get it, unless the sheriff gets to it first—because I guarantee Alex has already reported the theft.” I left the keys in the ignition and walked to the Pathfinder, leaving Jean to follow me.

Alex stayed behind the wheel, but gave me a squinty-eyed glare as I climbed in the passenger seat and Jean slid into the back. “You got any wipes? Something to clean off that steering wheel and anything else you touched?”

Crap on a stick. Fingerprints. I dug through my backpack to find the towelettes I carried in case of spilled potions and went back to destroy evidence.

“Did you call it in?” I asked a few minutes later, crawling back into the passenger seat. I’d barely gotten the door closed before Alex slung gravel and U-turned toward the highway.

“No.” His voice was hard and had dropped about an octave, so I knew he was mad. “I’ve never seen that stolen car. I don’t know shit about that stolen car. If you get arrested, I don’t know shit about you, either. And you owe me.”

Great. Another debt to repay. The rest of the drive to Buras passed in silence. Even Jean kept his mouth shut. I knew Alex had cooled off when he started drumming his fingers on my steering wheel in time to the songs on the radio. He liked to snarl and growl and posture with his weapons, but beneath the Man in Black guise was one of the few genuinely nice guys I’d ever met. I just had to let him keep his delusions of badassitude.

Finally, we reached Buras and hooked a left toward the river, where we found the unassuming new building that housed the Black Velvet Bar and Grill. On the far left side of the otherwise empty lot sat a pair of suped-up extended-cab pickups, one black and one white, with
MERTWIN1
and
MERTWIN2
license plates.

“That is my friend Rene and his brother, Robert,” Jean said as we climbed out of the truck.

I’d been excited about meeting my first mermen, but Rene and Robert Delachaise weren’t what I expected. Without the visual mythology of mermaids to sway me, I’d been free to imagine my own kind of merman. Tall, I’d thought. Rugged. Fierce. Trident in one hand, spear in the other. Kind of like a werefish Poseidon.

The mers did look fierce, but it was more in an urban street gang kind of way, like someone who might follow a lone pedestrian down a dark alley with ill intent. Plus there were two of them. Twins.

They both got out of the black truck, but the one Jean identified as Robert waved at us and held back, finishing a cell phone conversation. The other, Rene, stretched, making fascinating shapes of the tattoos that spanned from shoulder to wrist. They also danced on the back of his neck, beneath his white mesh tank, and out of sight. I was thankful for the tattoos—Robert didn’t appear to have any, and it’s the only way I’d ever tell them apart in their identical jeans and tanks.

Rene pulled off an LSU cap and threw it in the truck before slamming the door, then ran a tanned, wiry hand through his close-cropped black hair. He nodded at Jean and looked at Alex, nostrils flaring in surprise. “You a shifter? Good. I like shifters.”

He turned dark, liquid eyes to mine—such a dark brown they were almost as black as his neatly trimmed Vandyke beard, with long lashes that would be beautiful if he weren’t oozing hostility. “I don’t like wizards.”

Since the mers were in the werecreature family, I assumed I’d be able to pull some kind of energy off him even if I couldn’t fully read his emotions, and I was right. Rene’s aura was cool and smooth, rippled with restrained aggression, and the temperature seemed to drop several degrees as it skimmed across my skin.

Fingering the mojo bag in my pocket, I introduced myself, ever the professional in the face of extreme weirdness. It’s a gift.