Wild Man's Curse (Wilds of the Bayou #1) (20 page)

They bought sandwiches and drinks at a spot near the launch, and transferred their gear from the truck to the nimble marine boat, small enough to get in some tight waterways but big enough to support two engines, searchlights, and blue bar lights.

They set out, moving north and then south at gradually widening waterways, navigating partly from memory and partly by GPS when the light gave way to full dark. Although they had the twin outboards, they were propelling the boat with a quiet trolling motor: the better to slip up on someone.

“Kill your light and kill the motor.” Paul raised a pair of night-vision binoculars to his eyes and scanned the south bank of an overgrown outlet of the inexplicably named Billy Goat Bay. He handed them to Gentry. “See what you think.”

Gentry took the binoculars and studied the area where Paul had been focusing, passing by and then returning to a faint light coming from . . . something. He dropped his voice to a whisper. “Is that a fish camp?” He patrolled this area fairly often and didn’t remember any inhabited camps out here.

“One way to find out.”

“I better call it in.” They’d muted the radio to minimize their noise, so Gentry used his cell phone to call Warren. When he described their situation and location, Warren didn’t mince words.

“Go in slow and keep me informed. Unless you see something to make you think the victim’s life is in immediate danger, call it in and wait for backup. You hear me, Broussard? Lang’s desperate.”

Gentry and Paul exchanged glances in the glow of the cell phone. “I understand. I’ll check in.” He ended the call.

“You ready?” Paul asked.

“Let’s go.”

Trouble was, the only way to exit the boat and make their way through the dense growth of sawgrass without breaking their necks was to use a light. Paul, shorter and not as heavy, carried the flashlight pointed downward to illuminate as small an area as possible, and Gentry followed close behind. They both carried their rifles in addition to having their holstered sidearms.

They moved silently through the grass until they were close enough that the faint moonlight lit the outline of a small wooden structure about the size of Ceelie’s cabin. And like her cabin, the back end of the structure sat on land and the front was on piers over water, only this place had a fishing dock that stretched from the front porch. And unlike her cabin, this one had a back door.

A light definitely shone from inside, although it was a dim one. They slipped up to the front door and took their positions on either side. Paul still held the light facing down so they could see each other, and Gentry pointed to himself, then to Paul. He held up three fingers. Two fingers. One.

He grasped the door handle and turned gently, not expecting it to give. It was unlocked, however, and swung open with a squeak that sounded loud enough to be heard in Baton Rouge.

So much for the element of surprise. Gentry and Paul conducted a textbook search of the house, finally coming back to the front room, where a candle burned on a round wooden table; it had almost burned down to the end of the wick. An overturned chair lay next to the table.

“I’ll check out front.” Paul exited the front door and disappeared from view while Gentry continued to look around the cabin. A white card lay near the door and he picked it up and turned it over. His mouth went dry at the sight of his own business card. Whether it had been left by Ceelie as a clue or by Lang as a taunt—or dropped by accident—they had been here.

“Broussard, come out here.”

Gentry laid the card on the table so it could be dusted for fingerprints and stuck his head out the door. “Find something?”

“Oh yeah.”

Gentry couldn’t see Paul but could tell he was off to the right side of the building. He pulled out his own flashlight and as soon as he rounded the corner, he spotted what his fellow agent had found so interesting: an older-model blue Ford sedan.

“I also found one of my business cards on the floor of the cabin,” Gentry said. “They were definitely here.”

“Maybe not so long ago.” Paul didn’t touch the vehicle but skirted around it, shining his flashlight into the windows.

Warren told them to hang tight while he and the sheriff sent more personnel to the area. “Any sign they’re nearby?”

“No, although it’s dense back here with very little light, so it’s possible. I’m thinking they might have left in the boat Lang had earlier—there’s a dock in front of this camp. It’s just too dark out here to see anything, but we’ll keep looking.”

“Don’t go too far; the sheriff will want to coordinate efforts from that fish camp.”

Before leaving the cabin, Paul pointed out a smudge of blood on the driver’s-side window of the car. “Think Sinclair hit him?”

“Don’t know.” Gentry shone the flashlight across the window, then on more blood on the back of the driver’s seat. “But I don’t like the look of the backseat.”

Gentry’s heart dropped as he took a closer look. Blood, mostly dried, covered the seat bottom and the lower half of the seatback, like someone had been lying on it—someone injured. How badly had Ceelie been hurt? Had Lang left the candle burning intentionally or had he left in a hurry, maybe spotting Paul and Gentry as they crossed the sawgrass?

He turned slowly, scanning the dark marsh. Ceelie was somewhere nearby, and she was hurt. He could feel it.

CHAPTER 23

Burning. Something was in her eyes, burning. They were crusted closed but the sunlight was bright behind her eyelids. Where was she? Sensation of movement.

A voice kept talking although no one answered. It was too cheerful. Her limbs moved but not by themselves. Someone was carrying her; the shoulder against which her head rested smelled of blood. In her head, she heard a blast. Saw a flying wall of glass. Jena was dead.

Coughing. She lay on a hard, dusty floor but the movement had stopped. The voice again, but not one she recognized. Where was Gentry? She remembered a phone call. Glass flying. Lang in front of the SUV with a gun. He’d smiled when he aimed at Jena. The world exploded.

Cool water on a rough cloth scrubbed across her face. The voice said, “Wakey wakey” in its cheerful tone. She asked where Gentry was, but maybe that was just in her head.

Ceelie woke up—not for the first time, she didn’t think, but for the first time with any true awareness. She lay on a hard wooden floor that hadn’t been cleaned in eons, judging by the wafts of mold and dust that tickled her nose and throat. Even though she sensed that it would be wise to feign unconsciousness, the sneeze came without asking.

“About time you woke up. This ain’t no holiday resort.”

She lay on her right side and her arms had been tied behind her. Not tied, she decided after jiggling them. Maybe taped. With effort, she slit open her eyes just as a pair of blue-jean-clad knees dropped to the floor in front of her face, then a pair of shoulders, then a man’s face as he stretched out on the floor in front of her, almost in kissing range, a parody of lovers.

Not a man. Langston Broussard.

Not a man, but a monster with a face so much like the one she thought she might be coming to love.

Gentry.
She peeled apart dry, stuck-together lips to form the name, but nothing came out. She was immobile, and she was mute.

“Pretty blue-eyed, dark-skinned Celestine. You remember me?”

She tried to answer but only managed to croak, “Water.”

“Water, water everywhere and it’s all salty. Don’t that figure?” The man disappeared for a few moments, then returned. “Let’s see if you can sit up.”

He slid a hand behind her neck and pulled her to a seated position, propped against a wall. The room swayed like the deck of a ship for a few seconds before finally righting itself. Lang held a bottle of water to her lips and tilted it. Half dribbled down her chin, but the rest she drank greedily.

“Enough. Too much and you’ll get sick, and I don’t have time for that. We have business to conduct, you and me.”

Ceelie swallowed. “I remember you. You visited Tante Eva and Nonc LeRoy back when we were kids.” In a cabin a lot like this one. Traditional South Louisiana fishing camp made of wood. But where? Were they still in the parish?

“When
you
were a kid, you mean. I was sixteen. You were kind of sweet on me. You probably thought I didn’t know about that little-girl crush, didn’t you? Thought about banging you then, but I was afraid that batshit old aunt of yours would put the voodoo hex on me.”

Ceelie’s awareness of her situation finally kicked in. The outside of her thoughts remained fuzzy, but a core of comprehension and memory was growing. “What do you want from me?”

“What do you think I want? Same thing I wanted from your crazy old Tante Eva, but she was too damned stubborn to give ’em to me. I want the coins.”

Ceelie frowned at him. “What coins?”

Langston Broussard was a thinner, unhealthy version of his younger brother, but now Ceelie saw another couple of clear differences: a hardness in his dark-brown eyes she’d never seen in Gentry’s. Meanness. And jittery nerves, which could mean drugs or desperation, or both. “If you’re gonna start with that I-don’t-know-nothin’-bout-no-coins shit, you and me are gonna have a long day, Celestine.”

Ceelie had never heard mention of coins, but Tante Eva talked of a curse and LeRoy Breaux was supposed to be a thief. “You mean the coins Nonc LeRoy stole?”

His hand shot out so quickly she didn’t see it coming, not until his fist made contact with her jaw and her head cracked against the wall behind her. Everything faded slowly to gray, then black.

A throbbing jaw brought Ceelie back to consciousness. She’d fallen over, her back against the wall that had been serving as her prop. This time she didn’t give herself away, but studied her surroundings.

They were still in the fish camp, but she could see Lang’s profile standing in the doorway on the left side of the cabin. A small candle flickered in the center of a round table. Lang held something long and narrow in his right hand—maybe Jena’s shotgun—and he was smoking a cigarette. A pistol, the rifle, and a roll of duct tape lay on the table.

Darkness had fallen, so she’d been out at least ten hours since he’d taken her. Between her call to Gentry and Jena’s radio distress call, there should be a lot of people out looking for her.

God, Jena. Had Lang killed her? There had been so many shots. Ceelie had been covered in broken glass and hadn’t managed to get off a single shot before something had slammed into her head and she’d lost consciousness.

She did a mental inventory of the pain signals her body was sending to her brain in a steady march. The throbbing jaw came from Lang’s fist. Her face hurt all over, but it was probably due to minor cuts from the glass. She vaguely remembered shielding her eyes at the last second. Her head was sore where it touched the wooden floor, and Ceelie imagined she felt a lump there. Lang had hit her with something. Not a concussion, she didn’t think.

Other than a need to relieve her bladder, she didn’t think she’d suffered any other injuries.

At least not yet. Fact was, she didn’t have the information Lang wanted unless she made something up. Would he kill her as soon as he thought he had the location of these coins? Or would he kill her—only more slowly, playing with that knife as he’d done with Tante Eva, or raping her—if she didn’t tell him what he wanted?

Either way, she’d be dead, so it might as well be faster rather than slower.

Lang turned to look at her, and Ceelie was pleased to see the upper part of his T-shirt sleeve was covered in dried blood. Maybe Jena had at least grazed him with her shot, and he hadn’t changed clothes, so they were hiding out. He hadn’t brought her to anyplace he’d been living for long.

He walked closer and nudged her knee with the toe of his worn leather boot. “Wake up. We gotta move.”

When she didn’t respond, he kicked her, more to startle her than to hurt. She opened her eyes and tried to sit up, but he had to help her first to a sitting position and then to her feet. She reeled and the room reeled with her. Finally, her equilibrium settled.

Lang’s hand on her upper arm slid to her breast; she stiffened when he squeezed, hard. “We’ll find a new spot to hide out and then I might have a few ways to convince you to talk.”

He turned away to the round table in the center of the room, and Ceelie made a shuffling run toward the cabin door.

He caught her by the tail of her shirt and slung her to the ground, knocking over one of the chairs. “Nice try, bitch.” Leaning over her, he slapped a length of duct tape over her mouth.

“Just for that, I’m gonna take a little taste of what my brother’s been enjoying as soon as we get to our next stop. First, though, we have a couple of nosy cops out in the marsh who’ll eventually work up the balls to come in here. So we’re gonna take a boat ride.”

Cops! Ceelie’s frantic gaze skittered around the cabin, looking for something that would draw their attention without making Lang angry enough to knock her out again. Or at least she had to let the cops know they’d been here.

As Lang pulled her across the cabin toward the door, she remembered the business cards in her back pocket and managed to twist her arms enough to pull one out between her fingers and let it drop to the floor.

Then she had no choice but to be dragged out the door and down a wooden dock, where Lang shoved her into a small aluminum boat. She thought about jumping in the water, or upending the boat, but with her hands tied behind her she’d drown. She hadn’t given up on living enough to commit suicide. She just had to wait for an opening, hope Lang made a mistake, and pray that the authorities would find her before it was too late—and Gentry, because she knew he’d be looking for her.

Lang propelled the boat away from the dock with a long pole to avoid making noise, and continued to use it in the shallow cove to make slow but silent progress. Did he know where he was going or was he looking for a hideout of opportunity?

Over the shoulder of his moonlit silhouette, Jena spotted the bobbing light of a flashlight crossing the shoreline toward the cabin. Maybe two figures, but it was hard to tell. It took a few moments for her to realize tears were blurring her vision, adding to those already coursing down her cheeks.

She swallowed down the fear and rage; there was no time for it. Since he didn’t want to draw attention, Lang had shut up for a change, so it gave Ceelie a chance to think of a strategy.

Coins. Tante Eva sure hadn’t lived as if she’d been wealthy, so either LeRoy Breaux had stolen some coins or the coins were themselves the curse that Tomas had talked about. If the curse had started with Julien Savoie, maybe he had found a cache of coins when he built the cabin on Whiskey Bayou, so their age would make them valuable. Cajuns, Creoles, and Chitimacha alike were proud peoples, but often downtrodden and suspicious. The Savoies were some of all three, so they might well be more likely to hide the treasure than use it, especially if they thought the money might be claimed by somebody else.