Wild Man's Curse (Wilds of the Bayou #1) (23 page)

CHAPTER 27

They had heard the far-off sound of outboard motors a half hour after Ceelie had finally gotten Lang to shut up. Maybe he was trying to translate the Cajun French she’d spit at him, because that had done the trick. His incessant chatter had driven her crazy, although she’d learned a lot that might help her.

After her transfer of the curse, he’d taken another pill, finished off the last of the water, and eaten the last pack of crackers in front of her, giving her the evil eye as he chewed.

The impact of two days with little food or water, and a lot of blows to her face and head, had begun to wear on her. The room tilted more often, her vision grayed, and nausea rolled through her in waves. She stayed conscious by her sheer refusal to give in to it. If she survived, she’d have time later to moan about her physical condition. When you were trying to figure out how to stay alive, little things like how your face must look, what hair you had left, or which body parts hurt the most? They didn’t matter.

They heard the motors at about the same time, a drone of engines—no, multiple drones—coming through the window. Lang ran into the front room and came back with the duct tape. He tore off a length and roughly slapped it over Ceelie’s mouth. As if she had enough strength left to yell.

“C’mon, bitch, time to move.” He jerked her up by her bound wrists and pulled her into the front room. The rifle and shotgun, his pistol, and Jena’s SIG Sauer lay on the counter of the kitchenette, along with a cell phone he’d told her belonged to the late Tommy Mason.

Lang looked at the assault rifle a moment, picked it up, turned it to Ceelie, and made a
rat-a-tat-a-tat
sound as he pretended to shoot her. Then he set it on the counter and left it. Ceelie knew nothing about semiautomatic rifles, but she thought its ammunition clip thing was missing.

He dragged her out the door and shoved her into the boat, her right shoulder taking the brunt of her fall.

Then he stopped to listen. Ceelie struggled to sit up, straining to hear the direction that the motor sounds were coming from. She’d swear she heard them on all sides, which sent a current of hope through her. Law enforcement was closing in.

Lang must have decided the same thing. He started the boat and moved slowly, his gaze in a constant loop around the horizon. He avoided open water and kept the boat as near the bank and overhangs as he could.

He was paying no attention to Ceelie and she gave serious thought to rolling herself off the boat and into the water. She imagined how it might work. Her wrists were taped together in front now, and her legs were free. She couldn’t swim with her arms bound; did she have enough leg strength left to hold her breath and try to push herself to shallow water? Was the water already shallow enough? If she jumped, would Lang shoot her as soon as she surfaced?

She didn’t know the man well, but she knew the type. He was unhinged. On the verge of panic. In over his head and aware of it.

He was also fixated on those coins, however. Until she’d unsettled him with her Cajun curse, he’d talked nonstop, and Ceelie knew his plans, such as they were. He’d found out about the coins when he’d gone to a Houma pawnshop a few weeks ago and recognized Tante Eva coming out. He’d talked to the pawnshop manager and learned about the Confederate gold, which reminded him of the story LeRoy Breaux had told him.

Lang considered the coins his way out. Out of poverty, and out of living in hiding with Tommy Mason’s charity his only means of support other than the odd day jobs he could pick up as he moved around Houma, where he wouldn’t be recognized. With the coins, he could disappear, free of law enforcement and the drug dealers to whom he owed money. A lot of money.

Maybe he’d fake his own death again. Last time, he’d been picked up by a small fishing boat owned by the cartel of drug dealers. It had been following the larger boat just in case someone needed an escape hatch. This time, he’d travel to Texas and kill some nobody who fit his description, plant Tommy Mason’s cell phone in the poor dirtbag’s pocket, and spend the rest of his life drinking margaritas and snorting cheap Mexican cocaine.

Langston Broussard was deeply delusional.

Ceelie had spent a lot of time making her own plans, and drowning or having her head blown off by an enraged kidnapper while she floundered in a muddy swamp didn’t figure into it. She decided not to jump.

So she sat in the boat like a good abductee and waited until Lang either got his ass caught or found another spot to hide. Then she’d have to do some fast talking—assuming she could get him to untape her mouth.

Lang turned the boat a hard right into a narrow bayou overhung with trees, and came to a stop about twenty yards after making the cut.

Swiveling to look at the bank, Ceelie glimpsed a glint of sunlight on metal deep within the trees. Lang ran the boat as far up the muddy bank as he could, jumped out, and jerked her to her feet. She tried to stay upright when he slung her toward the woods, but slipped in the mud and only managed to keep her head from hitting a protruding stump by catching herself on her elbows.

God, she was tired. The mud covering her chest between the flaps of her open shirt felt so cool she was tempted to wallow in it. But Lang pulled her up by what was left of her hair and shoved her ahead of him. “In that shed. Now.” He spoke in an exaggerated whisper.

The door to a rust-tinged tin shed stood ajar. A few yards beyond the structure lay what was left of a wooden house, long abandoned and on the edge of collapse. She tried to point toward the house, which wouldn’t feel as much like baking inside a tin can as the shed, but Lang shoved her inside. “Get in there. We’ll only be here until dark.”

Ceelie had long lost track of the time, but judging by the angle of the sun, she’d guess it was about midday. She gestured toward her mouth. Unless he removed the tape, she had no hope of talking Lang into her plan and making him think it was his idea.

“Forget it. I don’t want to hear your yapping.” He pushed her into the back corner, and she sat, grateful for the dirt floor but keeping an eye out for snakes. With her luck, she’d talk Lang into taking her home and then get killed by a cottonmouth in this godforsaken shed.

He ignored her for a while, but after pacing every inch of the shed about a thousand times, he finally leaned over and none too gently ripped the tape off her mouth, taking a chunk of skin with it. Like that mattered at this point. Still, it hurt, and the tape-ripping had opened some wounds on her face, not to mention removing the top layer of her lower lip. Rivulets of blood tickled her chin as they ran down and ended in red droplets splattered onto her exposed, muddy chest.

Her mouth was so dry that she had trouble getting the words to start. “Lang, they’re getting close. If you want those coins, now is the time.”

He’d been pacing again, tapping his fists against his thighs in time to his steps. Now he stopped. “Where are they?”

Ceelie said a quick prayer that he didn’t kill her. “They’re at the cabin on Whiskey Bayou. I won’t tell you exactly where because I’m not stupid. Once you have the location, you have no reason to keep me alive. And without me, you’ll never find them.”

He grinned, a macabre scarecrow with a shaggy growth of beard and sweat beading on his thin chest, which sported several bug bites since he’d left his T-shirt behind at the last cabin. “What’s the difference if I kill you now or kill you at the cabin as soon as I have the coins? You know damned well I’m not leaving you to my goody-two-shoes brother.”

It mattered because, at the cabin, she’d have a fighting chance. She knew where to find the ax, the kitchen knives. She knew a box of wooden matches lay inside the throwing-table drawer, so she could set the damned cabin on fire for a diversion if she had to.

That, Lang didn’t need to know. “Let’s just say I want to stretch out my time with you as much as I can.”

The toe of his heavy boot connected hard with the muscle of her left hip, and she couldn’t help but cry out. She chastised herself; that had been her fault. If she’d learned anything in the past twenty-four hours, it was that sarcasm led to pain. “That was out of line.” She tried to put some humility in her voice. “I’m sorry.”

“You should be.” Lang took a bottle of pills out of his jeans pocket and tapped one into his palm, then dry-swallowed it. Ceelie assumed the pills were amphetamines, judging by his lack of need for sleep and jittery energy. How many could he take before he crashed or his heart stopped? It probably wouldn’t happen fast enough to save her.

“There’s one big problem, little Celestine, my voodoo queen.” Lang resumed his pacing. “Cops will be all over that cabin.” He stopped. “Can you make us invisible with your voodoo hoodoo? No, didn’t think so. Useless bitch.”

“Look, I want to get this done once and if I’m not going to have those damned coins, they might as well be yours. You have Tommy Mason’s cell phone, right?” She’d planned this part; she just had to sell it. “If the phone isn’t dead, call the sheriff’s office and tell them you want to talk. Give them a location far away from the cabin, down in South Terrebonne. They don’t know where we went after that last hideout, assuming they even found that. For all they know, we went south.

“That might work.” Lang kept pacing. He was making her dizzy. “I could tell ’em we’re in Cocodrie.”

“They wouldn’t expect you to hide somewhere a lot of people lived in, like Cocodrie. Maybe say you’re east of Cocodrie toward East Bayou, a mile or so behind that little church on Little Caillou Road. I was there once, so I know it’s isolated out there except for a few fishing camps. A lot of places they’d have to search.”

She paused to let some of that sink it. Judging by the frown on his face, he was listening. “Why the hell would I do anything you come up with, Celestine? Ain’t like you’ve got anything to gain by helping me.”

No, but she had so much to lose. She hadn’t realized how much this new life back in the parish had come to mean to her, even given the circumstances. “You’re right. I’ve got nothing to gain, so you might as well consider it. Think about it. The sheriff will send everybody he has to keep you from running that boat out to the Gulf and getting in international waters.”

She got ready to deliver the coup de grâce. “Those deputies would never think you’d have the balls to show up again at Whiskey Bayou. They wouldn’t think you were smart enough. They might not even be watching it—then they’ll really feel stupid when you slip in and out right under their noses.”

Ceelie was betting they wouldn’t leave the cabin unguarded, even if they did send a lot of their resources south toward Cocodrie. And maybe, just maybe, Gentry would recognize the location as being where she and Jena had been heading to see Tomas Assaud. That, and the ax, and the matches, constituted her big plans.

Because she had no clue where those coins were, if they even existed.

CHAPTER 28

Gentry slumped in a chair in the corner of an empty room in Terrebonne General Medical Center, waiting for his partner to be brought in. She had awakened briefly before he arrived, and the medical staff was moving her to a private room—a sign of how quickly she was rebounding. She’d been lucky; the bullets hadn’t gotten any vital organs.

Gentry had spent an uncomfortable half hour with Jena’s parents and younger brother, who had asked him a lot of hard questions about her shooting. He knew Warren had called them, but he wasn’t sure how much detail the lieutenant had provided. Probably not much, since no one except Ceelie had been present when she’d been injured. They knew their daughter had been shot by her partner’s brother, though, and Gentry didn’t know if their accusatory glares were real or a projection of his own guilt.

Jena’s mom was as his partner had described her—tall, regal, with a darker version of Jena’s red hair and a haughty attitude. Her father wore a dark suit and tie with an immaculate white shirt. Jena had described them as stuffy uptown New Orleanians, and they looked the part. They had disapproved of her degree in forensics, had fought her choice to join NOPD, and had practically disowned her when she took the LDWF job in Terrebonne.

Her brother, on the other hand, sported shoulder-length brown hair and full-sleeve tattoos. He didn’t sit next to his parents, but had moved into one of the generic blue chairs next to Gentry after the initial inquisition.

“You look burned-out, man.” Jackson Sinclair was in his midtwenties; Jena had characterized him as a free-spirited computer genius. “You’ve been trying to find the guy who shot my sister?”

Gentry knew the elder Sinclairs were listening, so he made no attempt to keep his voice low. “My lieutenant made me take a few hours off. I’d been on duty twenty-four hours straight, since Jena was injured. I wanted to check on her, and I’ll go back on duty as soon as they’ll let me.”

When a nurse came in to tell them Jena would be moved to a private room and it would be a while before anyone could see her, Mrs. Sinclair and Jackson went to the cafeteria while Mr. Sinclair marched off to the administrative offices, where he intended to order that his daughter be moved to a “real hospital,” preferably in New Orleans. Gentry doubted his attitude would get him far, plus he knew Jena: if given a choice, she wouldn’t go.

Which left him alone in the small room, waiting for the hospital staff to bring her over from the critical-care unit. The white blinds of the room’s one large window looked out on the roof of the hospital entrance, with the sprawl of downtown Houma beyond. Well, as sprawling as a town of thirty-five thousand could get. Still, it was the only real city in the parish and the largest in the region.

He’d been furious when he left the operations base, snapping at Mac Griffin’s chatter until the gregarious young officer had stopped talking. He’d slung gravel like a teenager when he left the staging area and headed his truck north toward Houma. The longer he drove, though, the more fatigue had set in and he realized Warren had been right. He was too emotional to be on the water, too likely to make a mistake that could hurt Ceelie rather than save her.

Yeah, he wanted to be the one to save her. That was macho bullshit pride talking, and when he stopped by his house in Montegut to shower and change, he gave himself a lecture about it. It didn’t matter who saved Ceelie as long as she was saved.

By the time he ate a sandwich, endured some ankle biting from Hoss, and then loved on his little dog until even Hoss had had enough, he felt human. After three hours of sleep, calm had settled on him like a cloak. He wasn’t less angry at Lang or less worried about Ceelie, but he felt centered. He’d cleaned up Ceelie’s guitar, and on the way to the hospital, he’d stopped at a little music shop in Houma and left the Gibson to be repaired. His version of optimism.

At a loud bump and commotion in the doorway, Gentry turned to see a woman being wheeled into the room. It wasn’t Sinclair, though. He was on the verge of telling the staff they’d made a mistake until he got a closer look at the woman in the bed. He’d been prepared for pale, but not the swollen mass of cuts and bruises covering Jena Sinclair’s face and hands. Stupid on his part. She’d been hit at close range by an exploding truck window, in addition to the bullets.

By the time the hospital staff got her IV and bed adjusted and raised the head slightly, the previously silent, antiseptic-scented room was filled with the noise of machines that beeped and whirred as they constantly checked her blood pressure and heart rate.

“Gentry?”

He startled, unaware that she was awake, and walked to her bedside. “Hey, Red. How you feeling?”

He pulled a chair over and, after a moment’s hesitation, took one of her hands gently in his.

“What happened? The doctor told me I was in Houma, in the hospital.” Her voice was weak and Gentry leaned forward over the bedrail to hear her.

How much should he tell her? She might be strong enough to be in a private room, but she wasn’t out of the woods.

“You got injured on duty,” he said. “You were shot.” Twice, by his murderous SOB brother.

“Shot?” She frowned and stared at the ceiling. With alarm, Gentry saw the pulse rate on the bedside monitor rise into the eighties, then the nineties.

“Shhh. Calm down. You’re going to be fine. Look at you, already rockin’ a private room and everything. Your family will be back in a few minutes.”

Jena swallowed with some difficulty, and Gentry reached for the plastic cup of ice chips the nurse had left. “Open your mouth a little,” he said, and slipped one on her tongue. She nodded and tried to smile. Hard to do with her face so bashed up.

“I remember being with Ceelie, driving down past Chauvin.” Jena’s voice had already grown stronger. “She was playing her guitar. This car was following us and . . . Oh my God.”

Gentry kept hold of her right hand, but Jena held up her left, looking at the defensive injuries. “I held him off for a long time, but he shot out the window next to Ceelie and turned the gun on me when I stood up to check on her. I got off some shots but don’t know if I hit him. Did I hit him?”

Gentry gave her hand a light squeeze. “You did, and you at least injured him. You also popped the magazine out of the rifle so he couldn’t fire it.” He wasn’t sure he’d have had the presence of mind to do that, not with a torn-up face and two gunshot wounds.

She raised her left hand to her face and lightly touched the bruised, butchered skin. “Guess that’s the end of my modeling career.”

“You’re too good an agent to worry about that shit. Anyway, it’s only been a day—it’ll get better.” What kind of scars it would leave behind, he didn’t know.

“Is Ceelie okay?” Jena closed her eyes, and Gentry could practically see the brain circuits firing as she tried to remember. “I had her crawl into the backseat as soon as we realized it was Lang in that car, but . . . is she okay? Did he shoot her?”

“I don’t think . . .” No, more than he wanted to say. “No, he didn’t shoot her.”

Jena wasn’t as out of it as she’d been a few minutes earlier. She turned her head to frown at him. “You don’t think what? What are you not telling me, Gentry Broussard?”

Aw, hell. “Lang took Ceelie with him. But we’re closing in on them, and as far as we can tell, she’s still okay.” Well, ambulatory didn’t quite mean okay, but he wasn’t about to burden his injured partner with tales of blood, and buttons, and long locks of hair.

“Oh no.” Jena shut her eyes, and a tear escaped down her cheek. “I should’ve tried to outrun that car instead of stopping. I was—”

“Don’t.” Gentry’s voice came out sharper than he’d intended, so he softened it. “Don’t second-guess. We didn’t know Lang even had access to a car, much less that he’d be hanging around near my house. I’m pretty sure he followed you all the way. At least you noticed him before you got all the way down near Cocodrie.”

“Why are you here? Why aren’t you out there looking?” Jena frowned at him again. “What are you not telling me this time?”

Gentry smiled. “I’d been on duty a long time and wanted to get some sleep and check in on my partner.”

Jena shook her head, but winced at the pain even that movement caused. “I’m calling bullshit on that one. Try again.”

They hadn’t been partners long, but Jena read him very well. “Okay, if you have to know, Warren said if I didn’t get out of his way for at least eight hours, he’d fire me and have Sheriff Knight throw me in a cell for interfering with an investigation.”

Jena tried to laugh, but it set off a cough and a groan. “God, it feels like my whole chest is on fire.”

“Then shut up for a while, and I’ll fill you in on the case.” He embarked on an account of the past twenty-four hours, leaving out the most disturbing details and playing up the more lighthearted ones. “Oh, and you won’t believe this.”

“What?” Jena had grown more alert the longer he talked; she seemed to be calm after the initial memory had hit her.

“My fill-in partner has been Paul Billiot. And he cursed. Twice. In two consecutive sentences. One was the f-bomb.”

Jena gave a bruised, misshapen version of a grin. “Wish I could’ve heard that. What set him off?”

For a moment, Gentry saw Paul’s face when he realized Lang had chopped off Ceelie’s hair. “I think it was something the sheriff said.”

“Good to know there’s a human underneath the robo-agent.” Jena closed her eyes, but popped them open again when Gentry’s cell phone rang. He pulled it out of his pocket and almost choked. The screen read:
TOMMY MASON
.

It had to be Lang. Mason’s phone had never been recovered. They’d even tried calling it a couple of times but it had been turned off or was out of area.

“Broussard.”

“My brother Gentry. Long time, no talk.” Lang sounded like the sociopath he was. Charm fueled by drugs.

“Where are you? Where is Celestine Savoie?” Gentry was aware of Jena struggling to raise the head of her hospital bed to a more upright position. “You son of a bitch. If you’ve hurt her—”

“Oh, relax, Gent. Your little bitch is doing just fine, although if she comes at me with that voodoo shit again, I can’t be held responsible. You know how that is.”

Good for Ceelie. She’d turned on her inner Eva, because she knew that on some level, Lang was afraid of it.

“So here’s the deal, bro. I’ve gotten in a little deeper in this shit than I’d planned for, you know? I ain’t got the money to make a run to Mexico and this shitheap of a boat is about out of fuel. So I’m willing to talk to the sheriff if he’ll make me a sweet deal. I can give him enough names to wipe out half the crime in Terrebonne Parish. But I ain’t gonna spend the rest of my life in jail, so he’s gotta cut a real deal. Otherwise, you know, I ain’t got no reason to keep this witch alive, and once they find me I got a lot of firepower.”

“You want the sheriff to call this number?” Because as soon as he hung up, every law-enforcement officer in the parish would have it.

“No, I want to see his face when he makes the deal. See if he’s lyin’ to me. If he’s lyin’ I ain’t buyin’, and you can tell him that.”

Gentry paused, torn between getting Lang’s rendezvous point himself or giving him the sheriff’s cell number and staying out of it. But there was no guarantee Lang would follow through and, for now, Gentry had him on the line.

“Where do you want to meet him?”

Lang gave a loud, dramatic sigh. “I don’t know exactly where I am, but some little shithole north of Cocodrie, behind a church on Little Caillou Road, maybe a quarter mile east of Bayou Terrebonne.”

“When?” Gentry had pulled out his pad and written down the info.

“Tell him I’m waitin’ but I won’t wait forever.”

“But—”

But, too late. Lang was gone. When Gentry tried to call the number back, he’d turned the phone off again and the call went to a voice-mail box. Lang was either conserving battery life or playing games. Or both.

Jena raised her hand to get his attention, her voice little more than a whisper now. She didn’t need to be talking this much.

“That was Lang. What did he say?”

“Red, you need to get some rest and let me—”

“Damn it, what did he say?”

Gentry gave in and described the place. “Probably another half-rotted fish camp like the last hideout.”

Jena’s heart rate sped up enough to cause the machine to beep. She glanced at it and forced herself to breathe. “It’s a ruse.”

Gentry had pulled out his phone to call Warren and the sheriff but paused with his finger poised over the keypad. “What do you mean?”

“That place. It’s where I was taking Ceelie—where Tomas Assaud lives. I bet Ceelie gave him that location as a sign.”

Gentry stared at her, thinking. “Why?”

“I don’t know, but it’s too much coincidence. Ceelie would never tell him that location if there was any chance he’d go there. She wouldn’t put Tomas in danger.”

Understanding dawned, and Gentry’s heart sped up more than Jena’s. “No, but she might have convinced Lang that sending the manhunt south would open the door for him to move north.”

Jena nodded with some effort. “To Whiskey Bayou.”