Wild Man's Curse (Wilds of the Bayou #1) (21 page)

If she were a suspicious swamp-dwelling half-breed, which she was, and she came across a cache of treasure she didn’t want publicized, where would she put it? Ceelie had looked under the mattress in the cabin, but not inside the mattress. She’d looked under the bed and moved every stick of furniture. She’d gone through everything in the cabin’s kitchen. There were open rafters, so there was no attic in which to hide something.

Tante Eva didn’t have a bank account; Ceelie couldn’t imagine she had a safety-deposit box.

The most likely story was that Tante Eva had told LeRoy about the coins—they’d lived together for years, although Ceelie didn’t know how many—and that LeRoy had stolen them and skipped town.

That story, however, wasn’t going to satisfy Lang Broussard. He wanted the money. She was going to have to get him talking, at least enough to learn what he thought happened to the coins, and then wing it.

If he thought Tante Eva still had these mysterious coins, she had to have them hidden somewhere on the property, assuming LeRoy hadn’t stolen them without Lang knowing about it. They weren’t in the cabin, so they were either buried in the swamp or they were underneath the cabin. She decided on the web of lies she would spin. Now she just had to stay alive and keep Lang Broussard in a good mood long enough to trap him in it.

CHAPTER 24

Sometime between one and two a.m., Gentry and Paul finally gave up and made their way back to the fish camp that had become the new central command.

Gentry collapsed on the floor against a back wall of the main front room. He’d found a shred of duct tape and some drops of blood near the wall, and he knew Ceelie had been here, maybe even leaning in this same spot. The duct tape was another sign of her; it would make an easy, cheap, and effective restraint for Lang to use on her.

No doubt they’d been here. Lang hadn’t been careful about fingerprints—why bother, at this point? Plus, he’d been in a hurry. Gentry thought they’d surprised him, but not quickly enough to prevent him from slipping out of here with Ceelie. Then, of course, there was the business card, which Warren seemed to think Ceelie had found a way to drop, to let the authorities know they were getting close.

He shut his eyes, sending a prayer heavenward for the first time in three years. When he’d killed Lang—make that when he’d
thought
he’d killed Lang—he’d abandoned the faith instilled in him by his parents. He didn’t understand a God who made a man choose between killing his brother or letting his partner die, who let innocent people like Ceelie get caught up in something so evil because a junkie wanted drug money, who let screwed-up people like Lang prosper and survive while someone good and honest like Jena Sinclair fought for her life.

But he prayed his way through that baggage. He prayed for Ceelie to survive both physically and emotionally, for Jena to survive the surgery she was undergoing as of about a half hour ago. He prayed that he would be strong for them and help them move on with their lives no matter what wreckage Lang left behind.

Surely, every once in a while, the good guys had to win. Surely it was time to end the Savoie curse. To end the Broussard curse. Maybe it wasn’t just the love of the parish he and Ceelie had in common; it was the ghosts of the past.

He did not pray for Lang. If there was a God, and if he were listening, he’d know a hypocritical prayer when he heard it.

Gentry opened his eyes halfway and watched Warren, Sheriff Knight, and a captain from the Louisiana State Police huddle over a parish map. The cabin, which had no electricity, had been illuminated like a stadium with portable lights running off noisy generators. If the freaking International Space Station flew over, the cabin would probably show up as a bright dot in the middle of a dark, dark swamp.

The map, which covered the entire round table, showed every bayou and bay and bog and gator slide in the parish—thousands of places to tuck oneself away and hide. To commit torture.

Don’t go there.
If he went there, he’d lose it.

A virtual armada of state and parish marine units had been gathering for the past two hours, ready to launch a massive manhunt from what had become Fishing Camp Central as soon as the first gray predawn light gave them visibility. LDWF agents from the adjacent parishes in Region 6 had arrived during the night.

Sheriff Knight was in charge, but Warren had a major role since his teams knew the waterways better than anyone. Knight thought the most likely area for Lang to hide out would be within the confines of the Pointe-aux-Chenes Wildlife Management Area, more than 35,000 acres of protected wildlife area just east and southeast of Montegut and stretching into neighboring Lafourche Parish. Left to his own devices and absent any emergency calls, the Pointe-aux-Chenes WMA was one of Gentry’s favorite places to patrol and one of the state’s last stands to protect the rich ecosystem from erosion and storms that pushed in saltwater. It was secluded but for the hunters who were already into duck season, but it had no cabins. Roughing it had never been Lang’s cup of tea.

“What do you think, Broussard?” The sheriff speared Gentry with a glare. Apparently the groveling hadn’t been sufficient, so he’d further the ill will by disagreeing.

“I don’t think he’ll go into Pointe-aux-Chenes.” Gentry climbed to his feet with difficulty. He was emotionally and physically spent. “I doubt Lang has a tent or anything to protect him from the elements and, believe me, my brother doesn’t do physical discomfort. There are only two boat launches if he needs to get back on land, and there are lots of hunters and fishermen this time of year. He’d see it as too risky. Plus, there’s a possibility that he was injured.”

It was too early to know if any of the blood from the truck was Lang’s. Maybe it was all Jena’s or some of it was Ceelie’s, but as many shots as Jena had gotten off, chances were good Lang had been hit too. Maybe the bastard would bleed to death, doing them all a favor.

Knight crossed his arms, wearing the demeanor of a man who’d just taken a bite out of a lemon. “You think he could find a way to depart the parish?”

Gentry rubbed his eyes. “My gut says no. If Lang took Celestine Savoie because he thinks she can lead him to this alleged cache of treasure, it’s easier for him to hide out nearby. I think he’ll find another place like this one: an isolated fishing camp where he can get out of the elements, reachable only by boat. I think he’ll stay relatively close to Whiskey Bayou and the Savoie cabin. He has to go back there eventually if he thinks that’s where the coins are.”

“Except he has to know that cabin is under surveillance night and day,” Warren said. “How does he think he can get in there to search right under our noses?”

Gentry had no answers as to his brother’s state of mind now, but he knew the way Lang used to think. “He thinks he’s smarter than the average bear, and bears definitely include law enforcement.” Gentry walked over to look at the map. “He’s been playing a game of chicken with us all along, trying to scare Ceelie Savoie away from the cabin, leaving Tommy Mason for us to find the way he did, then setting the tongue outside Ceelie’s door.”

Gentry had been thinking about something else. “What do we know about that car?”

“It was registered to Tommy Mason over two years ago,” Knight said. In honor of the heat, the sheriff had removed his suit coat and rolled up his sleeves. The end of his tie flapped from his right pants pocket. “His wife claims to have no knowledge of it, or of your brother. What about it?” His expression told what he thought of Jennifer Mason’s lack of knowledge.

“Since he had wheels, I’m guessing Lang was probably watching my house and followed Jena Sinclair and Ceelie Savoie from there.”

As soon as the words were out of his mouth, he wanted them back. The sheriff’s eyebrows shot skyward, and Warren shook his head with a
what-an-idiot
expression.

“Let me get this straight, Broussard. The victim of this abduction, taken by
your
brother, was staying at
your
house. I’d been led to believe she was staying with Agent Sinclair.” Knight crossed his arms and, yeah, the man was intimidating. Gentry wanted to grovel again. “Son, you’re up to your neck in this shitstorm.”

“Yes, sir, it would appear so.” Gentry shrugged. You couldn’t argue with the truth.

Knight shook his head and resumed his study of the map.

Warren walked over to Gentry, put a hand on his shoulder, and nudged him into the back room, which contained a bathroom and a couple of sets of bunk beds. “See that bed over there?” He pointed to a lower bunk. “We can’t do anything for the next three hours, when day breaks. Close your eyes for a while if you can. You’re our best insight into both Lang and Ceelie. I need you to be sharp, and the sheriff has you on his radar again as a potential problem. Just sleep a while.”

Seriously? The man thought he could sleep? Gentry opened his mouth to protest but then closed it. Warren was right. He’d be no good to them if he turned sloppy out of fatigue; nothing he could do about the stress. He couldn’t sleep but he could try to relax and slow the thoughts racing through his brain. “Okay, but let me know if anything comes up or you hear about Sinclair’s surgery.”

Gentry stretched out on one of the bottom bunks and a sweet scent hit him like a blow to the gut. Ceelie had been here; her head had been on this pillow. He could smell her shampoo. He rolled to his side and pulled the hard rectangle of foam to his nose, inhaling her. Twenty-four hours ago, they’d been in his bed, together.

“You all right, Broussard?” Paul Billiot came in and flopped on the bottom bunk on the other side of the room. “Warren’s put me in time-out for a few hours too.”

Gentry cleared his throat, unwilling to let Paul see how choked up he’d gotten over a faint scent on a pillow. “Yeah, I’m not feeling the whole going-to-sleep shit, though.”

“I hear ya,” Paul said, then promptly fell asleep. Gentry could tell by his steady breathing.

Just as well. He wanted to think about coins, and about his brother. Lang had been laying low for three years. If their hypothesis was true that he was after a pot of gold at the end of the bayou and that he’d learned about that gold more than fifteen years earlier, what had happened to prompt his sudden interest?

“Broussard! Billiot!”

At the sound of Warren’s voice, Gentry sat up and cracked his head on the bunk above him, and saw Paul do the same thing across the room. He’d fallen asleep despite himself.

Gentry was on his feet before he fully awoke. “What happened? Did somebody find her—find them?”

“No, but come out here. We just got an interesting call from the state. Sheriff Knight wants to tell all of us at once and get some feedback.”

Gentry followed Warren into the “war room” and noticed the eastern sky through the open front door. It had turned from jet-black to charcoal. Another half hour and they could see well enough to mobilize and discover what was around them.

Sheriff Knight leaned against the room’s north wall, looking like he needed a nap himself. Warren’s fatigue showed in the dark circles under his eyes. After two hours of sleep, Billiot looked fresh as a water lily. Must be clean living.

The sheriff ended his call. “Okay, we got a report back on the skull that Ms. Savoie found hanging on her porch.” He looked at his watch. “Lab’s been working overtime to get it to us as soon as possible.”

A forensics report in under two weeks and in the wee hours of dawn. That had to be some kind of miracle, but Gentry didn’t see the big deal. They knew Lang was the culprit, and compared to his other crimes, stealing a skull and hanging it from a porch roof would probably rank low on the prosecutor’s list. Murder trumped grave robbery; that skull had been too bashed and battered to have been purchased.

“The medical examiner had told us the skull belonged to a male, approximate age sixty-five at the time his skull was presumably separated from the rest of his body.”

Knight paused for effect. “The DNA, though, matched up with some old information in CODIS; the skull belonged to LeRoy Breaux.”

What the hell?
Gentry and Warren exchanged shocked looks. How in God’s name had Lang Broussard gotten his hands on LeRoy Breaux’s skull?

CHAPTER 25

“Time to play, little Celestine.”

Ceelie kept her face blank even though the feel of Lang’s thumb circling her breast through her torn blouse made her want to do a number out of
The Exorcist
and projectile spew right in the face that was such a twisted parody of Gentry’s.

But she’d decided, when they sailed away last night in that boat, twisting and turning through the bayous until she wasn’t even sure they were still in Terrebonne Parish, that no matter what he did to her physically, he would not touch her heart, her soul, or her mind.

She was scared, no hiding that, but the anger had begun to take the edge off the fear. He might kill her. He might do horrible things to her before he killed her. But he would not break her. She made that vow to the memory of Tante Eva. To her father. To her people. To Gentry. To Jena.

They lay on the moldy mattress of a rusted iron bed in the remains of a house that had seen serious flooding. The walls had gone way past mold, and the toxic air carried the chalky smell of baked-on mold spores. The doors and windows had been blown out or washed out.

Lang had pushed the bed up against the wall and then hemmed her in with his body. First, he had stripped off his bloody shirt. His upper arm had taken one of Jena’s shots, and his anger over that was what had earned Ceelie the first punch to the gut as soon as she’d regained consciousness the first time.

Her captor was thin, pale, and lanky, with lines on his face that told her his years had not been easy, and track marks across both arms that told her how he’d spent many of those years. She hadn’t seen him shoot up so far, but he’d popped pills. A lot of pills and no food, which made him unpredictable and volatile.

She was going to have to channel her inner Gentry and Jena in order to protect herself. She’d been with both of them when they were outside the home environment, and both of them constantly scanned their surroundings, pausing long enough to assess a movement or situation, then resuming their scans. Ceelie needed to read Lang’s body language, to see what his triggers were and avoid them. If she were unconscious, she’d lose any control over her fate.

Not that she had much control, but earlier, she had convinced Lang to cut the tape off her wrists long enough for her to pee in the deep sawgrass and relieve the pressure on her shoulders from having her arms restrained behind her for so many hours. He also had offered her a packet of peanut butter crackers, the little cellophane-wrapped packs sold at every convenience store and vending machine on the planet. He’d let her have a little more water, although his supplies were running low.

Advance planning didn’t seem to be Langston Broussard’s strong suit. Otherwise, he’d have realized that if he shot—maybe killed—an LDWF agent, it would bring out every law-enforcement agency in the region. He would’ve had backup plans. He’d have had supplies. Instead, he had a couple of candles, a roll of duct tape, a knife, a six-pack of water bottles, and a few packs of crackers. And pills and cigarettes. Of those, he seemed to have plenty.

After a half hour, he’d taped her wrists together again, in front this time, and stretched out beside her on the bed, touching her a little—mostly her breasts—before going to sleep. His touch held no heat and she wondered if the drug use had taken its toll in the sex department. She’d come across enough junkies in the Nashville club scene to have heard several bemoan the trade-off of highs for hard-ons. Too many of the former eradicated the latter.

Good news for her, unless he used his fists to take out his frustration over an inability to rape her. Those worked just fine. Twice while he slept, she’d tried to slowly maneuver herself toward the foot of the bed, hoping to escape into the swamp. Both times, he’d moved quickly and without warning, hitting her hard enough to bring tears.

Now he was awake again, and Ceelie thought showtime had arrived. Until finding this abandoned house, he’d been too concerned with survival and avoiding capture to question her about these mystery coins, but she had her story ready. First, she had to get him talking rather than touching.

“I do remember you, when you visited the cabin that summer,” she said, keeping her voice soft and calm. “I thought you were the cutest, coolest guy I’d ever met.”

“I know you did.” Lang propped on his left elbow and ran his right index finger along the line of her jaw. Between the cuts on her face from the broken SUV window and his repeated blows, even the light pressure of his finger stung her skin and sent shards of pain racing down her neck and up to her temple.

“Why didn’t you ever come back? I’d look for you every time I came out that summer.”

“Did you now? I wanted to go back, but, well, you know.”

Ceelie frowned. She didn’t know. “What? Why didn’t you come back?”

Lang pinched her cheek, and she felt the sharp sting as a cut reopened. A wet trail streaked down the side of her face toward her hairline. “Because of LeRoy, bitch. Don’t play dumb.”

Unfortunately, she didn’t have to play. She had no idea what he meant. “Lang, I was eight years old. All I knew was that Nonc LeRoy left Tante Eva, and I think it happened that summer but I’m not sure. I don’t know why he left, or where he went.”

Lang turned her face toward his and studied her, then grinned. God, he had deep dimples like Gentry, but instead of an even row of white teeth, his were yellowed and two were broken. What a laugh God must have had in making these two men so similar up to a point, and then taking them in polar-opposite directions.

He released her chin. “You really don’t know, do you? I keep forgettin’ how little you were. Nonc LeRoy, as you call him, didn’t leave, sweet Celestine, at least not how you think. You tell me what you think happened to him.”

To do that, Ceelie had to put herself in Lang’s shoes, then in LeRoy’s, and finally in Tante Eva’s. “Eva killed him,” she whispered.

“She bashed his face in with the business end of an ax.” Lang’s thin face, with his curly dark hair so like Gentry’s but his eyes filled with hatred, grew somber.

“That’s horrible.” It was Ceelie’s turn to stare. Was her Tante Eva capable of murder to protect those coins? And was the ax Ceelie had slept with that night in the cabin the thing that had killed LeRoy?

“Ain’t it?” Lang reached in his pocket and brought out a knife with a wicked serrated blade and black handle—a tactical knife similar to the one in her purse, which was either still sitting in the blood-spattered truck or was wherever the sheriff put stuff like the personal effects of kidnapping victims.

He flicked it open and popped off a button of her blouse by shredding the thread holding it on. The once-white blouse was covered in blood and dirt, but at least it kept her covered.

“I think I’ll ask the questions for a while. If I don’t like the answers you give”—he popped another button—“then we’ll see what I need to do to make you more cooperative.”

Ceelie swallowed hard, hoping he couldn’t hear her heart pounding. “What do you want to know?”

“You tell me, Celestine. Why would that old witch Eva kill LeRoy Breaux, the man who’d been living with her for years?”

Ceelie didn’t know about any killing, but she had thought about those coins and LeRoy’s anticipated windfall. “He wanted the coins, and she wouldn’t give them to him.”

Lang tapped her on the nose with the side of the knife blade. “Good girl. Why wouldn’t she share with her loving husband?”

Biting back the point that Eva and LeRoy weren’t married, which Lang might not even know, Ceelie tried again to put herself in Lang’s head, in LeRoy’s head. Especially in Eva’s head. “She thought the coins were a curse handed down from her grandfather Julien.”

That rang true to her. If Julien had found some of South Louisiana’s fabled treasure when he first moved to Whiskey Bayou from Isle de Jean Charles, rousing the ill will of his Chitimacha peers, he might have considered it more curse than blessing. “She thought that it was bad luck to use them.”

“Ding ding ding—give the girl a circus monkey.” Lang leaned over and kissed her. It took every bit of Ceelie’s resolve not to bite the son of a bitch, or at least spit in his face when he removed his lips from hers. “It wasn’t the coins that was bad luck, though. It was how they got ’em. Eva and LeRoy had some pillow talk, like couples do.”

Lang traced his knife edge along the shoulder of her blouse. “Eva told him her granddaddy done killed a man for those gold coins after they found them down in Isle de Jean Charles. The other guy wanted to turn ’em in to the property owner, and Julien, he figured he could take it all for himself. He took ’em and hid them at Whiskey Bayou, using one or two to live off all these years, and the family’s been cursed ever since.”

He popped off another button while Ceelie absorbed that information.
Sin always has to be paid for,
Eva would tell her. Julien’s sin, or her own?

“So guess what Eva did?” Lang’s voice was soft.

“You said she killed LeRoy, I guess with an ax.” She saw the truth on his face, or at least what he thought was the truth. “I honestly didn’t have any idea.”

He nodded. “Yeah, you were just a kid, so I’ll give you that. Let me ask you this. How do I know Eva killed LeRoy if I never went back to the cabin after that summer?”

Ceelie thought a moment, but there were only two possible answers. She whispered, “Either your friend Tommy told you, or Tante Eva told you that morning?” The morning he murdered her.

“That
bitch
.” He rolled off the bed and began pacing. “She said”—he broke into a parody of a singsong Cajun French accent—“‘I done kep’ that no-good LeRoy from finding that money and tellin’ everybody about it. Instead, I done took his head. You can see it right over dere, and you think after keepin’ that secret all dese years I’m gonna tell you?”

Ceelie watched him pace and struggled to understand. “His head?”

Lang stopped and grinned. “Remember that skull hanging on the porch? My little gift to you? Well, that was LeRoy, comin’ back home to Whiskey Bayou. Where his fucking
skull
had been all this time.”

An unbidden memory came to Ceelie’s mind. She’d been a little older, maybe twelve or thirteen, and had spotted a skull in the bottom of Tante Eva’s pie safe, tucked amid her collection of candles. “Who is this?” she had asked, and Tante Eva, with a little smile, said, “Child, that is something to keep us safe.”

It had been LeRoy’s skull.

Ceelie’s expression must have been horrified enough to appease Lang, because he began pacing again. “Well, I had to keep trying to make her tell me where the coins were and, well, the bitch died on me.”

“But why? There are other ways to get money.” Ways that didn’t involve murdering elderly women for some coins he didn’t know for sure existed.

“We all haven’t had a fairy-tale life, little Celestine. My holier-than-thou father sure as hell didn’t give me that fairy tale, with all the rules he tried to make when he wasn’t even home most of the time. My whore of a mother who barely let the bed grow cold after dear old dad died before she replaced him—she didn’t give a shit. And then there was my . . .”

He looked down at her and smiled with a look that sent chills down her spine. He stretched out on the bed beside her again. “Sure wasn’t my baby brother, Gentleman Gentry, the golden boy who followed the rules and played nice and did just as he was told.”

Lang squeezed her breast and ran his hand lightly down her belly. He dug his fingers into her crotch hard enough to make her flinch. “Yeah, Gentry’s getting some of that; you been at that glorified trailer he calls a house for days. I think it’s time Gent and I shared something. Never had much in common with my stick-up-his-ass little brother before.”

Ceelie couldn’t quite keep the quiver out of her body. Maybe she’d been wrong about him being impotent.

He used the knife to pop off the remaining button on her blouse, then used the tip of the blade to push the fabric away and expose her beige bra. He traced the top of the bra with the blade, not hard, but it was sharp enough to draw a light cut that instantly beaded with blood.

He leaned closer, his breath warm in her ear. “I can’t screw you the way he can, but I can make it so he don’t want you anymore. I’ve already screwed up that pretty face, and now . . .

He leaned back and Ceelie closed her eyes to brace for a blow when she saw his hand snake toward her. But instead, he grabbed her ponytail and jerked it out from beneath her head. “I bet Gentry loves running his hands through this, don’t he, sweet Celestine?”

Ceelie wriggled, her composure shattered as he got on his knees, jerked her ponytail out straight and sawed across her hair next to the elastic band.

She couldn’t stop the tears when he held up the ponytail, a thick, long snake of jet-black dangling from his fingers. She closed her eyes and gulped down a sob.
It’s just hair. It will grow back. You will not let him break you. You can cry later. Not now.

She opened her eyes and sucked down the rage and sorrow. “Don’t you want to ask me another question?”

Lang had been stroking her inner thigh and examining her body like a starving man at a buffet, but he stopped. “What’s that?”

“You want to know where the coins are, don’t you? The rest of them?”

She didn’t see his hand coming until it hit the side of her face hard enough to knock her head against the wall. The room spun for a moment, but her vision cleared. An open-handed slap instead of his fist for a change.

This time, Lang held the knife against her throat. “You do know. I knew it. You’re just like her, with your witchy ways and your chicken bones.”

If Lang thought she was a voodoo queen or a witch, well, better for her. He hadn’t touched Tante Eva’s throwing table, after all. “I threw the bones yesterday mornin’.” She used her own version of Eva’s accent. “I knew you was comin’, and I knew you was determined to get it.”

“Give me a break, little Celestine. Taking you was as easy as shooting that red-headed bodyguard of yours.”

Not a bodyguard, but a friend who was probably dead.

Ceelie spoke softly, keeping her voice low and musical.