“Mr Camber, I’m sure you didn’t want to do it…” Boudreau made her voice soothing. She still had no real idea what ‘it’ was, except maybe the murders of Jeannette and Anthea Larue, but she didn’t want to make any wrong guesses out loud that would risk setting Camber off. “If you’d just like to put that thing down, we can go someplace and talk. How about that?”
Apparently he had other ideas. He suddenly found his focus and glared at Boudreau as she tried to back up. Then he raised the two-by-four and swung it in a wide arc toward her. Boudreau whipped sideways, but still the weapon caught her a blow on the side of the head that made her skull ring with sound and sent her stumbling off the porch. She came down hard in the packed dirt of the yard, the impact with the ground jarring her right shoulder and sending a searing pain through the whole side of her body that instantly numbed her arm into uselessness. Dazed, feeling reality start to un-tether from her, Boudreau tried to crawl away toward the road. She heard Camber’s booted feet hit the dirt behind her.
“Antoine don’t—” Boudreau began.
He swung the two-by-four again. This time it smacked Boudreau between the shoulder blades and laid her out flat on the dusty earth where her forehead bounced, her teeth clacking together painfully as dirt sprayed into her face, up her nose, and into her eyes, stinging those to tears. Hot lightning bolts of pain arced up and down her spine.
Her last thought was “Oh Hell no!” and then the lights all went out.
Antoine Camber’s head buzzed with fervent whispers and seethed with bloody images. The visions would come and torment him, then vanish with an audible cartoon-like pop! He heard the voices of the Loa talking to him amidst the whispers and the things that they said nearly drove him crazy. He wanted it to stop but he didn’t know how to make it stop. Through it all, the single thought that now tortured him was—I killed a cop. I killed a fucking cop for her.
He needed to get away from he’d done. He also needed more drugs to make the whispering stop. After dragging the cop inside the cabin and leaving her there on the kitchen floor, Antoine threw away the two-by-four, matted and stained now with the cop’s blood and hair at one end, and ran to the cop’s vehicle. He drove away from the cabin, fast. He’d taken her gun, too, but not her cell phone, some part of his brain not yet ruined by drugs warning him that a cell phone signal could be traced. Besides, cell phones were often useless out here in the bayou.
In a panic made worse by his jonesing for more of the Zombie Dust, Antoine drove fast and recklessly, twice nearly running other drivers off the road, to Slidell where he used a payphone at a service station to call the mambo.
She first calmed his panic and hushed his incessant, near incoherent babble, and then she told him that everything would be fine, that all he needed to do was return to her. Come home. Antoine, practically blubbering with gratitude, said that he would do so immediately.
“Ditch the cop’s vehicle first,” the mambo instructed him, “because they’ll be looking for it and we don’t want to draw attention, do we?”
Antoine agreed that they didn’t want to do that and said he would get rid of the car right away.
“And don’t come here,” the mambo added sharply. “Go to the home of your sister acolyte. I will let her know to expect you.”
“Yes, Mambo,” Antoine agreed gratefully. “I won’t let you down again. I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. I—I doubted you, Mambo.”
“Just come home, my son, and I will see that you are given what you need,” she told him.
Antoine hung up, surprised to find that his cheeks were wet with hot tears. He brushed them away, embarrassed, and returned to the cop’s car. It was an ancient beater anyway, better off pushed to the bottom of the bayou, which was exactly where Antoine intended to leave it. The gun, he would keep. Just in case anyone else tried to stop him from returning to the mambo’s side.
After all, he’d already killed a cop. He was in the shit up to his neck. The only one who could protect him now was the mambo.
CHAPTER TEN
After her unhappy encounter at the Green Door Club, Flynn woke next morning feeling out of sorts and restless. She went for a run to work out some of the tension, returning to feed Charlie, and to shower before heading out again for coffee and beignets. The regret lingered, but some of the anger at herself had dissipated. A visit to Ariel’s store might cheer her up, she figured, and she had the pretext of using the visit to give Ariel a heads-up on Jean-Marie anyway. To her disappointment, the store remained closed and all of her attempts to rouse Ariel by knocking or calling up to the apartment above failed to elicit a response.
On the walk back to her office her phone rang. “Yeah?” she answered curtly, her mood a little soured once more.
“Hey. Uh, is this a bad time?”
Waylon Murray was perhaps the last person Flynn expected to hear from. She didn’t much want to talk to hear from him either. “What is it, Waylon?” she asked.
“Y’all seen Boudreau lately?”
“Last I saw her was yesterday.” This technically was true since it had still been ‘yesterday’ when Boudreau arrived at Flynn’s apartment late last night. “What’s up, Waylon? Y’all can’t keep track of your own partner? Might need to brush up on those detective skills of yours.”
“Oh, ha ha. You’re real funny, you.” Waylon paused. “Thing is, Boudreau was supposed to be at a press conference, but she’s kind of AWOL. She went out to Bayou Castine—” with obvious reluctance, Waylon filled Flynn in on their suspect, Antoine Camber, unaware that she already knew much of what he told her.
“This Camber dude,” he added, “has a fishing cabin out at Bayou Castine, and Boudreau, she went to check it out. I ain’t heard from her since. Can’t raise her on her cell neither.”
“You’ve tried her radio?”
At the top of the street, a noisy, gaudy second-line appeared and Flynn watched it for a moment before ducking into a side street and covering her free ear with her palm to shut out the din. Even funerals in New Orleans were an excuse to get loud and celebrate. Normally Flynn liked a second-line as much as the next person, but not when she was on the phone.
“Jesus Christ, Flynn. I know y’all think I’m as dumb as a fuckin fence post, but I ain’t really,” Waylon snapped. “‘Course I tried her fuckin radio. Can’t reach her on that neither.”
Cell signals often became spotty the deeper into the bayou you went, but Waylon should’ve been able to raise Boudreau on the shortwave police radio. Flynn bit back a sigh. “I could take a spin out there,” she offered.
There was a pause, then Waylon cleared his throat. “Y’all would do that?”
“I got nothing else to do right now.”
“Well, ’kay then. And, uh, thanks, Flynn. I guess I owe you.”
“That you do,” Flynn said grimly and hung up on him.
Although there seemed to be no immediate reason to panic over Boudreau’s being AWOL, Flynn nevertheless returned to her office and there she retrieved a Remington 870 Wing-Master pump-action 12-guage shotgun from the locked cabinet in which she kept all of her guns. If Boudreau had gotten into any tight spots, there was no better weapon for opening those up than the Wing-Master.
Boudreau came to lying on a cold stone floor, her entire body one big all-over throb. She cracked open a tentative eyelid, blinking away the wateriness there until she could focus on the bottom edge of a stove standing three feet from her head. Her right arm had become pinned beneath her and a prickly, fiery numbness throbbed through the limb like fire ants crawling beneath her skin. Gingerly, Boudreau lifted her head from the floor, turned it slowly first to the right and then to the left, feeling the bones in her neck crackle and rub together in a way that sent a wave of nausea through her, forcing her to close her eyes again and concentrate on breathing until the world stopped swimming around her.
Teeth gritted, knowing the pain in her arm would be ten times worse when blood started flowing through the limb again, Boudreau made an
other attempt to ease herself up from the floor, using her good arm for leverage and flipping herself over onto her back. When the pain came, it felt as though someone were pouring scalding water down her arm. She kept her teeth clenched hard enough to hear her own jaw crack, breathed shallowly through her nose as she prayed not to pass out all over again, until finally her circulation began to return to normal and the scalding pain eased to a bearable tingling. Huffing out a long sigh of relief, she reached up with her other hand to feel about her head, her fingertips meeting with a sticky dampness just above her right ear. Camber had ripped a good-sized chunk from her scalp when he’d hit her with that two-by-four.
Boudreau crawled to a sturdy pine table in the middle of the kitchen and used that for support to pull herself upright. She patted her pockets in search of her cell phone and gun, finding neither. “You fucker,” she muttered between clenched teeth. If Camber used her official service weapon whilst it was in his possession, there’d be official forms and inquiries following her beyond the fucking grave.
Footsteps approached along the wooden porch outside, the sound causing Boudreau to freeze, and her heart to surge into her throat.
It could be the mail man, she reasoned. Or it could be Waylon. Eventually he would realize that she hadn’t checked in for a while and he’d raise the alarm. Or it could be Camber, come back to finish her off. Clinging to the table, still dizzy and nauseous, and without a weapon, too, Boudreau knew she was a sitting duck. Her gaze jerked uneasily toward the door as whoever was outside rattled the knob.
“Waylon—?” she hissed. Her own voice reverberated inside her head, sounding too loud and too sharp, threatening to shatter the fragile eggshell that her skull become. She winced.
“Pierce—?” a familiar voice called. “Y’all okay?”
Flynn! Boudreau’s wince of pain turned into a happy grin. “In here,” she replied.
“I’m gonna have to shoot this lock out. Y’all cover your ears now,” Flynn warned her.
Boudreau leaned on the tabletop with both elbows, placed her palms flat against the sides of her head, taking care to avoid touching the wound above her ear. Still the retort from the shotgun was as loud as a thousand firecrackers going off at once. Her ears rang with it and tiny, sharp slivers of pain embedded themselves in each side of her skull.
Flynn strode into the kitchen, a Remington 12-guage shotgun hoisted across her shoulder, twin barrels trailing wisps of smoke. Her gaze alighted at once on Boudreau bent over the table, head clutched in her hands, moaning as the pain bounced around inside of her skull. Flynn smiled.
“What the hell, Pierce? Y’all look like hammered shit.”
Boudreau lowered her hands and glared at the PI. “Gee, thanks. Way to make a gal feel special, Flynn. What the fuck are you doing here, anyway?”
Flynn twitched an eyebrow. “Rescuing y’all, it would seem.” She rested the shotgun on the table, freeing her hands to drag a chair out from beneath the same. The skreeking of the chair legs on the stone floor made Boudreau wince all over again. Flynn helped her to sit, ignoring the grumbling that Boudreau did. “So what in the blue fuck happened to y’all -? ” Flynn frowned. “Waylon called me, all in a tizzy because he hadn’t heard from you. I said I’d come take a look but hell, I thought I’d find y’all sitting on the bayou, enjoying a picnic.”
Boudreau sighed. “Sorry to disappoint. I found Camber—well, he kind of found me. Him and his two-by-four.”
“Whoops. I take it that he’s gone?”
“Yeah. With my gun.”
“I didn’t see any vehicles outside either. I guess he took that, too, huh?”
Boudreau groaned. “Sonofabitch!”
Flynn smirked at her over one shoulder as she stepped over to the sink where she found a relatively clean dish rag to douse with cold water and brought that to Boudreau. “Here you go—hold this on the wound. Y’all are bleeding everywhere.”
“Yeah, wouldn’t want to mess up Mr Camber’s nice cabin.” Boudreau looked around at the busted door. “Y’all just need to make an entrance, don’t’cha?”
Flynn gave her an innocent look. “Well, hell, yeah—” she said, grinning. “Where would the fun be in life if you didn’t make a dramatic entrance now and then? Y’all sit tight here, Pierce. I’ll go find someone with a landline. No cell signal out here in the boonies.”
Boudreau leaned back, the wet cloth pressed to her skull. She closed her eyes. “I ain’t going anywhere.”
Flynn found a neighboring cabin with a working landline and called Waylon, filling him in quickly on what had happened.
“I’ll get the paramedics from Slidell out there right now,” he promised.
“This will have to become official now,” Flynn reminded him.
“I’ll square things with Cap’n Embry. Make it all look nice and tidy. Y’all just look after Pierce, please?”
“Of course.”
The paramedics arrived in less than twenty minutes, just before Waylon and a local cruiser out of Slidell. Waylon joined Boudreau and Flynn inside the cabin whilst the paramedics checked out his partner. They asked her the usual questions regarding a head injury. Did she lose consciousness? how long was she out? did she have any headache? nausea? double vision? Boudreau snapped answers back, insisted she was fine, would be fine just as soon as someone patched her up and gave her some goddamned painkillers, stopped asking her damned silly questions. She really was a terrible patient.
“Jesus motherfucking Christ,” Boudreau declared to Flynn when the paramedics announced that her injury would require a trip to hospital, and several stitches.
“Language,” Flynn chided her.
Boudreau shot her a poisonous look.
“You behave, you,” Waylon told her sternly and she gave him a look, too. He just grinned. Then he stepped outside for a moment with Flynn.
“There’s a piece of two-by-four over there in the weeds—” she pointed and Waylon followed her gesture, his pale features tightening with anger and dark thoughts. “It’s matted with hair and blood—Pierce’s, I’d bet. You might want to bag and tag it.”
“I’m on it. And—thank you, Flynn.”
“Don’t mention it.”
Flynn meant it. Waylon knew it.
The paramedics completed the ride into New Orleans in record time, lights flashing and siren blaring the whole way, all much to Boudreau’s mortification. She complained bitterly about that, too, when Flynn met her in the ER, having driven back in her Trans Am without the traffic-dodging benefit of lights and sirens.
“Y’all want they should’ve dawdled along, taken in the scenery?” Flynn asked.
Boudreau growled something beneath her breath which Flynn didn’t quite catch but which she didn’t need to hear to know was obscene. Whilst a small battery of tests were run on the detective and a nurse found to clean and stitch her wound, Flynn went to scare herself up a cup of coffee.
“Doc says I have a mild concussion and a sprained shoulder,” Boudreau told her when she returned. The detective rolled her eyes. “A couple thousand bucks outta my insurance for that? I could’ve fucking diagnosed myself for free.”
“Are you cleared to go home?” Flynn asked.
Boudreau nodded. “Someone needs to stay with me,” she added.
Flynn raised her eyebrows. Boudreau sighed. “Is it such a fucking chore?” she demanded.
“Yes,” Flynn told her simply.
Boudreau had been instructed to take at least one week off from active duty, something which Captain Embry endorsed. She was livid. “A week,” she raged to Flynn. “What in hell am I going to do at home for a week at home? Sit around and watch TV while I eat fucking ice cream and get fat?”
“It’s only a week,” Flynn pointed out.
Boudreau’s glare warned her to shut up.
Before discharging her from the ER—with a bagful of pain pills from the hospital pharmacy—the doctor warned that if Boudreau’s dizziness or nausea worsened, or if she experi
enced double vision or excessive tiredness, that she should return immediately. He wagged a stern finger. “And absolutely no drinking alcohol with those pills, Detective.”
“Yes, Dad,” Boudreau muttered. As she was being driven away from the hospital in Flynn’s car, she demanded, “What the fuck is ‘excessive tiredness’ anyway?”
Flynn shrugged. “I think maybe it means if y’all fall asleep and can’t wake up, you would be in some serious shit.”
“Yeah—?” Boudreau snorted. “Well, if I fell asleep and I couldn’t wake up, then how in hell would I get myself to the fucking ER?”
“That’d be why you’d be in serious shit.”
Boudreau shifted uncomfortably. “I don’t want to be a pain in the ass about this staying with me shit. I mean, if you’ve got—someplace else you’d rather be -? ”
Flynn smiled. “It’s no problem to me. We could find a movie on Pay-Per-View, get some popcorn going…have ourselves a real girly sleepover.”
Boudreau stared at her. “Have you ever had a sleepover, Flynn, girly or otherwise?”
“Hell, no.”
“I didn’t think so. Jesus, even the thought of you doing anything girly creeps me out.”
In the end they agreed that Flynn would take Boudreau home, help her to get settled, and come back later with food. No popcorn, Boudreau warned, and nothing remotely girly. Flynn left her ensconced on the couch with her pain pills, a couple water bottles, and the TV remote. Boudreau held the remote up, scowled at Flynn.
“I feel like there’s a backhoe digging my brain outta my skull and y’all seriously think I wanna watch Judge Judy?”
“Anything particular you want me to bring back?” Flynn asked, ignoring the sarcasm.
“Yeah. How about that mint chocolate-chip ice cream I never got?”
Flynn shook her head. So much for not wanting to be a pain-in-the-ass.
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